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MPlayer Developers Interviewed
cruocitae writes "Three of the MPlayer developers just gave an interview, talking about the "mysterious" versioning system of their software and shared a few secrets about the upcoming releases, for example some words about the long-awaited Windows GUI, and of course, DVD menus. Project integrity also was a subject.."
I don't even know what to say to that one.
Guys, If you want to be taken seriously, take the time to correct stupid mistakes such as this.
*Rubs eyes in disbelief*
ZERO
I'm constantly running into segfaults in mplayer. I don't know if it's just a whacky codec or what, but no matter what the input, no player should ever segfault on any media. If it does, that means that memory is being handled poorly, and that's a potential opportunity for an attack vector.
Hmm... just two months ago, Xbox Media Center came out with their new DVD-player core, including menus. XBMC is built around MPlayer, I wonder if they sent some code back to the MPlayer guys for that (or perhaps vice versa)?
I must admit to having skimmed over the interview. For the most part, my opinion of MPlayer as a functional piece of software has remained very high, but interest in the project has been waning. This article entitled "MPlayer: The project from hell" outlines some of the frustrations I had before I found a distro with a good package manager that could compensate for my newbie-ness. Back then, MPlayer really was superior to everything else (As far as I knew), and I've just stuck with it since. Maybe the attitude has changed by now, but MPlayer still got a black eye because manually trying to install it an exercise in frustration. Here's an example:
/usr/local/lib.
/usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig. Or install it to /usr/lib, because if you can't solve the /usr/local problem, you are careless enough to do such things.
"Don't get me wrong. There is documentation. It is scattered, and often incomplete, and carries the same attitude I had seen elsewhere, but it is there. An example of that attitude, taken verbatim from the FAQ:
Q: I compiled MPlayer with libdvdcss/libdivxdecore support, but when I try to start it, it says: error while loading shared libraries: lib*.so.0: cannot load shared object file: No such file or directory
I checked the file and it is there in
A: What are you doing on Linux? Can't you install a library? Why do we get these questions? It's not MPlayer specific at all! Add
Perhaps instead of taking the time to flame the person asking the question, the smart aleck could have simply answered the question graciously, then spent the time saved by skipping the flames fixing bugs in the installation script."
Unfortunately, neither VLC nor MPlayer can be included as libraries in other multimedia applications. Having to work with an embedded instance of VLC and MPlayer is a pain and not conducive to extending functionality in object-oriented fashion.
Xine and its corresponding library Xine-lib, on the other hand, can be used as libraries inside other frontend applications such as Kaffeine and AmaroK. This allows the frontend apps to focus on what they do best: GUI, usability and eyecandy, while the multimedia-intensive parts can be neatly accessed through an API.