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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.
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).......
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.
"... 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.
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
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