Mplayer Revisited

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.

Comments

MPlayer has matured...

[Valar]

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.

Re:Of course you were criticised!

[squiggleslash]

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.