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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.
The OSX build of MPlayer is very useful, it's the best DivX player for OSX! Of course it plays other formats as well. Thanks MPlayer team!
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I support spreading santorum
Sure, it's great to have a v1.0 release of MPlayer, but on the other end of the stick, Xine is not far off from hitting the 1.0 status as well. Won't this seem daunting to the end user (labelled automatically as stupid), having two different applications, with individual libraries, for doing the exact same thing. :P
Perhaps some collaboration between MPlayer and Xine should occur.
However, the fact I find most surprising, is that Microsoft hasn't stepped in argueing that the software cannot be called, "MPlayer". Perhaps it's 1.0 status may spur things on...
Let's hope the MPlayer guys don't ship their next release as version 9.0
I mean, imagine suggesting that a Linux user might not have a full and completye knowledge of the system, or that anyone should install Linux without first knowing absolutely everything about it.
Are you an idiot? The MPlayer programmers were born with this information (which does probably make them about 12, which kinda figures).
Rather than complaining you should be grateful and worshipful that they deigned to come down to this level, and allow us mere mortals access to their holy media player.
MPlayer 0.92 is the current stable release where everything works as expected.
MPlayer 1.0-pre1 has some nice new stuff, but even though it has one thing (support for input from v4l devices with hardware MJPEG support) which I've wanted ofr a long time, the current pre-release is much too flakey for me to use, and I've gone back to 0.92.
MPlayer 1.0-pre1 is for writing bug-reports, not reviews.
Unless Mr. Barr had a conscious or subconscious WISH to find things that didn't work right, i don't see why he wrote his review for the pre1 version.
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.
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Crudely Drawn Games
I've managed to compile and successfully run GNUMach and GNU/Hurd from CVS. I know my way around building code. But mplayer is still a pain in the ass. Seriously. And when I read the forums, I didn't dare ask a question. The developers' attitudes represent one of the most valid criticisms of the Free Software world -- support is fleeting.
As for using the software, it works pretty well, and has steadily improved. But I don't build it anymore -- I use the unofficial debian packages, and they work pretty much flawlessly.
Doesn't the author understand how the Linux/OSS community works, or what? Its not the devs' job to make shiny installation druids that you can click through. That's what distros are for. If you want to compile software, be prepared to do your homework. If not wait for the
Gimme a break.
VLC from VideoLAN accepts almost all the formats MPlayer groks. The major exceptions are the ones for which there is no GPL-compatible implementation. It can also transcode streams into different formats, or send them to the network, serve them as HTTP, etc. It is truly cross-platform and the Windows and OS X ports are extremely popular.
God, root, what is difference ?
For those of us who are less than happy about MPlayer's default GUI, there are far better alternatives, like KPlayer for KDE.
This guy's article is self congratulatory and self seeking. I don't care what run-ins he's had with the developers in the past.
A terrible review where he actually admits to not really checking it out fully, but still manages to come to the self-affirming conclusion that he was right all along, and takes the opportunity to take a personal jab at the project.
The only thing I learnt from this article is that the writer is bitter, and lacks tact.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The problem I heard about MPlayer was that it illegaly contained DivX code that was under a proprietary license.
Last time I checked was two months ago and MPlayer was still in violation of DivX copyrights. No distro can distribute it as the developer releases it. This is the real problem. This pushes it from Free Software to "cracked warez".
(SuSE, and maybe others, do distribute it but they rip out the illegal code, so it's missing a few codecs. Debian will also be shipping a stripped, legal version soon.)
Ciaran O'Riordan
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
If you're a fan of mplayer, you might want to check out MoviX which makes bootable mplayer distributions. My favorite variation is MoviX^2. You boot from the movix2 CD, eject the movix2 CD, pop in a CD or DVD with any mplayer supported format, and there you go!
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
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).......
Warning!!! Your system has been infected. Windows Media Player 9.0 is known to work only when the Microsoft Windows virus is present. As to your question, you might wish to use mplayer when you get linux reinstalled.
well there is a windows version :)
www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32-beta
i use mplayer under windows linux and osX
i like that you can begin to watch a movie
while your downloading it that just rocks
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.
IIRC, do the usual things necessary to download RealPlayer for Linux, select RedHat ix86 RPM format, and then look for the link. That's how it was a few months ago, I don't know if it's been made a more findable download since.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"... I made the Mplayer binary SUID and that helped. ..." /proc filesystem. Use this command to enable RTC for normal users:
/proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq
i dunno why he would do that but if it is about RTC then a closer look to mplayer (excelent) documentation would show this:
If you are running kernel 2.4.19pre8 or later you can adjust the maximum RTC frequency for normal users through the
echo 1024 >
Smile... tomorrow will be worse.
The Mplayer project's distribution of copyrighted win32 codecs is illegal.
One needs explicit permission from the copyright holder to distribute copyrighted works.
The Mplayer project does not have such permission from Apple, Microsoft and Real.
The codecs are available for free (as in beer) from their respective owners, but the included EULAs do not grant permission to redistribute.
It is obvious why Mplayer has yet to be accepted by Debian. The Mplayer team has no respect for copyright law and continues to violate the law.
Won't this seem daunting to the end user (labelled automatically as stupid), having two different applications, with individual libraries, for doing the exact same thing.
No. Xine should be installed on systems intended for non-techie end users. Mplayer is not a particularly great choice for non-techies. A'rpi is very much opposed to the idea of binary distributions (since it means that things may run slightly slower on a given system), and Mplayer can support so many things that to set up everything required for full support during a build can take a long time. It's less bad than building GNOME or KDE, but it's definitely not an "rpm -Uvh" either.
That being said, I use mplayer exclusively, and love it to death. It's keyboard controllable, can be used without one of those godawful "fake media player" UIs, is faster than anything else in existence, and has support for just about every interface and codec under the sun (that Open Source folks can get their hands on or reverse engineer). Those of you not familiar with Barr and A'rpi (the lead mplayer developer for a long time) should be aware that the two intensely dislike each other, and have flamed each other for ages. Regardless of how good Barr is in most areas (and this review seems pretty reasonable, saying that "mplayer ain't a great choice for Linux newbies", which is definitely true), keep in mind that he's quite likely to have some bias, as A'rpi does when talking about Barr on the mplayer website. I take both with a big, big grain of salt.
Perhaps some collaboration between MPlayer and Xine should occur.
It does. Of course, it's full of people flaming each other for not giving sufficient credit, but the two projects have shared a *ton* of code in the past, and is the only reason either of them are as good as they are.
May we never see th
His argument:
"I am a user savvy enough to be running linux. I am bright enough to fix problems. And yet, it was not easy for me to install this application. Therefore, it will be even harder for somebody who is new to Linux."
Your argument:
"What an idiot! He should have read the acoryphal poorly laid out document! Things are easy if you do all the chores perscribed to you by developers with no talent for technical writing and different systems than you!"
My argument:
"RTFM is not a valid complaint. Windows software installs without a manual. It does not expect you to RENAME directories after installing things to get them to work. It does not expect you to KNOW what codecs you want to use and already have them downloaded. It allows somebody to do what they need to do before hacking the source code of the underlying software. Why can't linux software do this as well. Oh right. Because we're better than them."
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Do not run SUID root if there is any other way to get the desired performance. From: http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/339193 Severity: HIGH (if playing ASX streaming content) LOW (if playing only normal files) Description: A remotely exploitable buffer overflow vulnerability was found in MPlayer. A malicious host can craft a harmful ASX header, and trick MPlayer into executing arbitrary code upon parsing that header. MPlayer versions affected: MPlayer 0.90pre series MPlayer 0.90rc series MPlayer 0.90 MPlayer 0.91 MPlayer 1.0pre1 MPlayer versions unaffected: MPlayer releases before 0.90pre1 MPlayer 0.92 MPlayer HEAD CVS Notification status: Developers were notified on 2003.09.24 Fix was commited into HEAD CVS at 2003.09.25 02:36:36 CEST MPlayer 0.92 (vuln-fix-only release) was released on 2003.09.25 12:00:00 CEST Patch availability: A patch is available for all vulnerable versions. Suggested upgrading methods: MPlayer 1.0pre1 users should upgrade to latest CVS MPlayer 0.91 (and below) users should upgrade to 0.92 OR latest CVS MPlayer 0.92 is available for download. -- Gabucino MPlayer Core Team
[ReidNews]
want a dvd? You need to use the "dvd" URL
dvd://title#
But this syntax
dvd://title#/chapter#
Doesn't work, you need this:
dvd://title# -chapter chapter#
Which is more typing than: -dvd title# -chapter chapter#
And filters for -vop are applied IN REVERSE ORDER.
How about this malarky:
-vop detc=dr=1:ar=0,denoise3d
commas distribute over colon, colon over equals, except for the first equals that shows a filter has options.
urrggghh...
Oh, and the syntax is horrible just in general. Some options only take effect when they come before or after certain things, certain ones depend on other options in weird ways (video filters, codecs, and -fps/-ofps hell).
Still, I love mplayer. Who am I kidding. I just way too much time trying to figure out how to do things I KNOW should work, I just can't get a handle on it.
ecasound, while having also having an insanely rich command line, is more logical.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
emerge mplayer Wow. that was tough. I think I need a beer and a pizza to help recuperate after such a trying ordeal.
The only reason I keep my Windows partition is so I can mount it like the bitch that it is.
Windows software installs without a manual
It also isn't being installed from source, rarely has anything close to the option flexibility of source-installed software, and is usually completely useless in the event that something fails in the process. I have a copy of VS6 here that bombs near the end of the installer and there's not a damn thing I can do about it, for example. I have shit installed here that won't uninstall properly and, short of removing it manually and hunting down and undoing every little registry key and config change, there's not a damn thing I can do about it.
Why does everything have to be "the way Windows does it"? Windows sucks, that's why I use Linux and BSD. I don't WANT it to act like Windows. That's the POINT. It's NOT Windows and it WORKS, that's why I LIKE it. It's not hard to type "apt-get something". I'm sick of people apologizing for users who are too coddled and/or stupid and/or lazy to even do that - it's how you wind up with people with busted-ass systems who call you up and whine all the time that the "computer is broken". Gee - that's because you installed every damn thing you came across by double-clicking randomly...
It's okay to make things easier to a point, but you have to put some responsibility on people for what they install. Windows doesn't, and, as a result (aong with some other issues), most Windows systems out there are hideously broken beyond repair.
Besides, if you're going to immitate ease-of-use, immitate Macs, not Wintels.
We're "better than them" not because we're "1337 d00dz", but because we actually make people stop and think about what they're about to do before they do it...
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Like I said: I found it died a lot. I tried with The Matrix and it died three times getting to the main menu, a couple of times it died immediately on trying to play the movie, and a couple more times during playback. It just disappears without any message.
Even more funny, I did the same thing last night on a Out-Of-the-Box SuSE 8.2 System; I just had to remove the useless crippled mplayer that comes with SuSE.
/dev/dvd -> /dev/sr0 amd enable DMA access for my DVD-drive to play dvds. Ah, and I had to run it as root, and you must not forget xhost + then to allow it to open a window. And Mplayer is the most blithering piece of software I know, but I found these messages were generally helpful.
At first I was a bit scared by all this stuff about installing additional codecs in the documentation, and I even downloaded ffmpeg because I follwed the documentation step by step, but later I found out it applies to the cvs checkout only, is already included in the release tarballs.
The fact is: for most cases, the included ffmpeg and other included codecs will already play more stuff than any other player, and installation was as painless as you describe, I just had to add a symlink
I really love mplayer because it is fast and responsive, delivers a much better quality than any windows player I used, has the freedom to jump ten seconds with arrow keys, ignories dvd no-skip zones, allows to adjust audio/video sync, to easyly correct aspect ratio, to adjust pan-scan (E/W key) and has really good deinterlacing for my kite surfing dvds.
If there is a piece of software that make me feel liberated, it is mplayer; it is the most single reason for me to boot linux as there is nothing comparable for windows. (Yesterday I found out mplayer runs under cygwin, but I didnt try yet)
p.
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
But for a media player, i found Xine to be better than both. It supports all the formats that mplayer supports, it also has a browser plugin, but it handles DVDs a lot better. In fact, the DVD menus and stuff like that works exactly as with a standalone DVD player.
Actually, it doesn't seem to support all the same formats that mplayer does. For one thing, mplayer uses win32 codecs to play some of the formats it plays. I think they both use liblavac for divx playing, and they both play all of my .avi files (I have some commercial proprietary stuff in windows that won't play most of my .avi files, but mplayer and xine in Linux play them with no problems). Xine doesn't play .asf files, but mplayer does. And I've a few mpg's that mysteriously don't play on xine.
My main bitch about xine is how it renders the movies. For some reason, mplayer renders much more sharply and clearly than xine. Doesn't make sense to me, unless one is optimizing the display for my slow hardware and the other isn't, or one is trying harder to scale up without getting blocky and the other isn't.
Like what I said? You might like my music
it doesn't seem to support all the same formats that mplayer does [...] Xine doesn't play .asf files
If you install the Win32 codecs, Xine will happily play all those formats you mention.
I've a few mpg's that mysteriously don't play on xine
I've a few mpg's that not misteriously don't play but on one of the players that i use (xine, VLC, mplayer...) and on none of the other. The "mplayer plays all files that other players won't play" myth is just that: a myth. You will always find files that are not playable on all players (or even worse, are playable on only one player).
mplayer renders much more sharply and clearly than xine
You are probably not using the Xv mode in Xine. If you use XShm (compatible with almost any hardware, but slower) the image is kinda blocky indeed. But any player (not just Xine or mplayer) that uses the Xv mode has the same sharpness. I actually spent some time figuring out this issue and i'm pretty sure about what i said above.
Like i said, both players (Xine and mplayer) are pretty much the same, except that Xine handles DVDs a lot better (mplayer's implementation is only the bare minimum).
In short form...
Pros:
Cons:
Maybe a Pro, maybe a Con:
I find it interesting, incidentally, that MPlayer supports Ogg Theora better than XIPH does at the moment, in my opinion....(mplayer actually does play back Ogg Theora files generated by the Theora CVS quite nicely. Now if only Xiph would ever work on Ogg Theora and the Ogg specification again...)
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