Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Mplayer Revisited

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the it-slices-it-dices dept.

Joe Barr writes "It's been two years since I first wrote about Mplayer. Maybe the fury of the developers/community reaction to the fact that I dared to criticize them for their treatment of users kept me away. Whatever. Now Mplayer has a pre1 version of release 1.0 out there and it's time for another look." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.

5 of 353 comments (clear)

  1. MPlayer has matured... by Valar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    MPlayer has matured, both in code and attitude over the last year or so, or at least I've found it to be true. I never really had trouble installing it in the first place (all you had to do was *gasp* read the directions and follow them), but the install has gotten easier. I find that it also works better on my PC now. Additionally, their teams seems to had lost a bit of the attitude-- a quick glance over the docs doesn't reveal any references to how stupid the average mplayer user is :). Maybe they finally realized that attitude was offending some people,and hurting the project, so they got over themselves.

    --

    ====
    Crudely Drawn Games
  2. Re:Of course you were criticised! by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Barr was criticised for quoting the FAQ out of context (an obviously tongue-in-cheek comment was quoted as some sort of flame of end-users) and criticising a pre-release program for faults also present, at the time, in Xine which he subsequently gave a rave review (the faults in this case concerned dependencies - Xine and MPlayer had more or less the same dependencies, but he ignored them in Xine's case and made a big deal of having to find them in MPlayer's case.)

    I fully understood the frustration the MPlayer community, which in my experience has always been very helpful and very proactive trying to create something that'll be ideal at the end of it (they may be wrong in some of the directions they've taken, but I don't doubt their motives), and really found the Barr article and his apologists somewhat disappointing. Barr really seemed to write the article in order to fire up a storm, certainly the quote out of context, an aggressive maneuver which it's hard to believe wasn't deliberate, backs this up.

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  3. mPlayer powers Xbox Media Player and Center by seven5 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    WOO HOO for mPlayer. I remember back in the day trying to get that mutha to compile. It was a pain in the neck. But once i did it, i had VIDEO ON LINUX!!! WOW. Now it is used all over as underpinnings for other apps. Its projects like these that are so great. This is where i feel opensource shines. Instead of doing a lot of work yourself, take a project that is established and working, and extend it. Xbox media player and now Xbox media Center both use mPlayer. By using the source that was available to them, it increased time to live so to speak. It works great and supports TONS of formats. Why reinvent the wheel. Especially in video players and html renderers (KHTML, MOZ).......

  4. mplayer's option syntax annoys me by amoe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why did they pointlessly violate the established (and useful) double-dash for long options convention in favour of an ugly and irregular one dash for all options? I'm aware that it's probably an imitation of the X standard, but in this day and age that's probably not a good thing to imitate. Also, it doesn't allow you to abbreviate with one-character options.

    --
    You look beautiful! Incidentally, my favourite artist is Picasso.
  5. Re:Spot on! by 0x0d0a · · Score: 4, Interesting

    More seriously, there *is* a wrong and right way.

    Ask a specific question. If you say "Can someone help me to get X working...", you're going to get a "no". Why? Think of what you actually just asked -- you, one of zillions of people, just said "will you commit an unknown amount of time to providing me with support for free".

    If you say "When I run foo, I get a 'RTC support not included' error. What can I do to fix this?", and you *checked* the documentation and google first, then you're likely to have a lot more luck, because the other folks can immediately respond with an answer. They just can't *do* anything with a "it doesn't work" post, and most folks are not interested in investing the time require to send out another post with a list of what information is required so that perhaps they can get a response back so that perhaps they can fix a random person's problem. You need to send out a post with enough information to allow the folks you're asking for help to answer your question without immediately needing to ask you for even more information.

    This is no different from free support for closed-source software. You'll get the same response on USENET if asking a question about Half-Life. If you're paying someone to sit on the phone and answer questions (like someone at Microsoft with an MSDN support incident, or someone at Red Hat with a commercial support package), *then* things may be different.

    It's not just a matter of *insulting* the other person -- you need to include enough information to let them do your request.

    --
    May we never see th