His Macintosh gave us a GUI, mouse and pointers. His NeXT machine gave us the World Wide Web. His iMac gave us a simple network appliance. His OS X now gives us a UNIX environment grandparents, moms and teenagers can use.
When the Macintosh came to my house and tried to give me a mouse and a GUI, I told him "It's already been done. GE beat you to it."
When the NeXT machine came to my house to give me the World Wide Web, I told him "a NeXT machine creating the world wide web is like Al Gore inventing the internet. Sorry, but a machine didn't give us the World Wide Web, people did."
When the iMac came to my house to give me a network appliance, I told him "What's the point? I already got a PC, and it works with everyone else's crap. And it cost the same."
When OSX came to my house to tell me that I now have a UNIX environment that grandparents, moms, and teenagers can use, I told him "I've already got Linux. OS X doesn't do anything Linux doesn't do."
Quite a set of lifetime achievements.
Just parallel development. There's fundamentally no difference between Steve jobs and Bill Gates, except that Bill Gates was able to hide during the desktop wars of the '80s, and it was those wars, in fact, that cleared Jobs out of the picture and paved the way for Gates and Co.
he used his gun as a reference point for the diameter of the bore. That kinda makes it even creepier.
Chances are, his dick would have been the only other thing he brought with him that he could measure with, but it wouldn't have told us anything we didn't already know.
I presume that if he used acetylene instead of gunpowder, it would still not be legal, according to this code? We used to build acetylene cannons when I worked at a muffler shop.:) Those 3" pipes could shoot some shit...
I realize this is a troll, but I'm getting sick of the slashdot stereotype.
....but what the fuck are all you assholes doing reading and posting comments to Slashdot this late on a Friday night? Do you really have nothing better to do than sit in your dorm rooms and play Wolfenstein with your Internet friends? Get out and fucking do something with your lives, losers.
After spending all week working hard at a business I've started with a partner, and all week (evenings) playing with my 3 kids and flirting with my wife (after 3 kids you don't have sex anymore, you just flirt), I'm relaxing. I'm looking forward to cleaning up the yard tomorrow hoping to chase off the field mouse that has recently arrived, and to prepare the yard for winter. It's going to be a long, hard weekend, and I'm happy to relax on a Friday night and read slashdot.
I wanted to thank you for giving the link to the US war crimes document. I've been wanting my wife to read it for awhile (we've been starting to follow the primaries and are looking at the candidates for all the things we don't like about the Bush family, so having this information will certainly help), but I couldn't remember where I found the link originally. When I read this reply of yours I clicked on the link, curious to see if it was the document, and lo and behold, it was. So I sent the link to my wife so she can check it out herself, now.:)
I hope you're not insinuating that mplayer is faultless.
Eh? Not at all. If you read any of the rest of this discussion, you may have stumbled across posts where I agreed with problems with MPlayer and even added my own.
I can see that, but you didn't present the information as personal experience
Let's go over some of the phrases and sentences in my original post, shall we?
IN my experience, MPlayer is better than xine
The big advantage I have with Mplayer
Xine may have it
The biggest plus to using mplayer, in my opinion,
When it comes down to it, MPlayer and Xine are the two best video players for Linux, so what you really need to do, probably, is spend some time with both of them getting more intimate with them. Then you'll find that one is better than the other, and you may disagree with me.:)
I made every attempt to show that I was presenting subjective experiences and not objective experiences. Really, with all the trash you've been talking about reading, perhaps you should practice what you preach.
You probably keep your eyes tightly shut, or read very selectively, otherwise i can't explain how you can miss the big honking Documentation link on their webpage.
There is one particular piece of information I have yet to convey. I have not used Xine except as the rpm provided with Mandrake. I have never looked at their website. I haven't needed to. The Xine packaged with Mandrake runs great out of the box, and I've never needed to go looking for documentation for it. I did not like the interface(s) provided, and I didn't like some of the other things. I saw a link to MPlayer from a discussion here in slashdot and went to check it out, and that's how I started with MPlayer.
Now, to close, I'll leave you with two quotes from this most recent post of yours. This should safely leave four fingers of your own pointing back at you.
So much for objective comments...
You probably keep your eyes tightly shut, or read very selectively,
Why don't you list some Free Software projects where everybody came together as friends and focussed on building the best package they could, in the presence of absolutely no competition, and succeeded in building a piece of software that makes everybody who uses it happy.
Just one will probably suffice.
In the meantime, consider these projects:
GNU/Hurd
Mozilla
GNU/Hurd didn't have any Free competition until Linux came along, and they didn't take Linux seriously as competition. Now GNU still doesn't have a kernel that can be considered competitive, and everybody came together as one to build that kernel. You *could* argue that Linux pulled people who would otherwise have worked on Hurd, (or whatever GNUs kernel was called at the time). You could also argue that RMS chased them off by saying things like "you moron. Come back when you have a clue ready."
Mozilla has been a dismal failure, although it is an excellent browser and an excellent development library. But since we waited 4 years for the shiny happy group of people united to make one really good browser, it's mostly irrelevant. Perhaps things would have been different if they had had competition? Perhaps things would have been different if they had accepted that IE was their competition?
You can control xine-ui with keyboard shortcuts as well. Moreover, there is a text-mode interface that you can use if you don't like the GUIs.
It's been unreliable on my system. In fact, Xine has generally been unreliable on my system. Nevertheless, it gets used fairly regularly, so it's not like I never use it. The fact that I don't like the GUI isn't a general problem with GUIs, it's a problem specifically with Xine's, and it's independent of skin. Buttons mysteriously stop working, volume being one of them. I also have a problem with the fact that Xine's volume button is independent of the mixer device. MPlayer uses the mixer directly, so if my wife watches a movie with MPlayer, and turns the volume down so it doesn't wake up the baby, then I have to open aumix (or another mixer) to restore the volume for Xine to play the sound audibly.
Read the docs before making uninformed comments.
Dude, my comment wasn't uninformed. I was trying to provide what I had experienced to another poster. Such rudeness is not needed.
Xine does have it. It's the -V and -A switches.
LIke I said, Xine may have it. THerefore:
Please read the docs.
YOu use "please", but don't come off at all being polite or helpful.
That's ridiculous. You can associate extensions with any player, and the results are similar.
I said:
The biggest plus to using mplayer [...] comes when you associate it with the file extensions
On my system, Xine takes about 5 seconds to start up when you click on a movie file. MPlayer starts up in less than 1 second. Also, after starting, Xine takes another 2-4 seconds to start the movie. I suppose it's filling it's buffers. MPlayer starts the movie immediately upon opening the window. Xine really does choke on about 1/3 of my movie collection, whereas I have not yet found a file MPlayer couldn't play. I'm not saying there aren't any, I'm only saying that it has played everything I've thrown at it, including stuff that high-dollar windows media players (and WiMP) couldn't play.
If it weren't for the tone of your post, I'd probably be more inclined to--as you say--read the docs for Xine, but I must say that you have completely failed to convince me I should bother. Mplayer's man page tells me everything I've needed to know, and quickly. I've never even seen docs for Xine.
Beautiful post, man. The parent outlined a set of impossible to achieve goals, and you showed him how they've already been achieved. Beautiful. And you managed to put your finger on my only serious problem with MPlayer, the fact that it doesn't create ~/.mplayer if it doesn't exist. I think it should also create default config files in that directory, possibly just copying a default from its base, that are well-commented enough that I can hack them without having to read the documentation, but not expect shit to work unless I read the docs.
Who should that install process be "easy" for? If I find it easy and you do not, is it easy enough? Should my Mother be able to install it? Even though the complexities of the program are too difficult for her to understand?
I would define an easy install as "You can try to do it without reading the instructions, but don't expect shit to work. You can read the instructions, follow them to the letter, and everything works as expected."
IN my experience, MPlayer is one of the easiest projects to install from source (Audacity coming in about even, possibly easier). Just because you don't get some fake wannabe installshield installer doesn't mean the installation is hard.
In MPlayer's case, it is my honest opinion, that the compilation process is mostly as easy as it can be given the circumstances. MPlayer combines software modules from countless sources and makes it all play nice inside one little binary. I think the complexity of the situation awards some understanding.
I have never failed to successfully install mplayer by reading the instructions. I've even gotten to where I don't read the instructions anymore, I've done it enough times and it doesn't change *that* much. Really, the only bitch I see about MPlayer's install is the same bitch about installing software distributed as source: using the commandline. While I think there can be some improvement, I still don't see any reason installing software has to be graphical. Why is it so unreasonable to expect people to use the command line to install software? That's something you don't do every day. Most people don't even install software every week. Hell, it's been months since I installed a new piece of software on my computer. Installing software is part of administering your computer. It's not something idiot end-users should be doing all the time. It *is* something that requires a little bit of understanding, the kind of understanding that can be gained by reading the instructions. If a user can't be relied on the read the instructions, what can he be relied on to do? Is he going to not read the instructions and then DoS the mailing list with questions that are answered in the instructions? Users all the time complain that the documentation isn't good enough, but do really take the time to read the fucking manual? Or do they just glance through, look at the index/table of contents, and then bitch that it's not good enough?
That said, documentation is one place MPlayer can use improvement. The answers are in the docs, but they can be pretty hard to find occasionally. Soon I'm going to start working on making svcds again, and I'm going to use MPlayer for it. When I get it down and I know what I'm doing, I'm going to write up my experiences and try to create a guide for idiots to make svcds under Linux. There are several available, but none of them hit the mark quite right. All of them are useful, however.
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".
While you did an excellent job summarizing the points, Eric S. Raymond
wrote an article that I found particularly helpful, and after reading and putting into practice what he was saying (all of which made sense) i started getting a lot more help from projects, and was actually able to contribute a lot more in general. Much more satisfying, I say.
Re:What about other software?
on
Mplayer Revisited
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· Score: 2, Insightful
See? You get a program that does what each one of the seperate programs do best, and only one install routine.
Um, isn't the UNIX philosophy having a bunch of small applications that each only do one thing, and do it really well?
Now.. what if all three groups combined their resources and put the best parts of each into one GOOD program?
YOu say that, but we've already seen this crap in action. How much better has Internet Explorer gotten since Microsoft dominated the web browser? How much better has outlook express gotten since microsoft dominated email clients? We've seen very little improvement in many applications that exist as the sole application in its environment that does what it does (sole means > 90% users). Instead, they stagnate, without improvement. Is this what you want to have happen to free software?
or you can put fs=yes in your.mplayer/config...or when it starts, hit "f".
I've got mplayer -framedrop -zoom associated with most video types in Konqueror, so I prefer to hit "f" when it starts. Frequent mistakes clicking the wrong movie. Also, sometimes I take advantage of opening credits and stuff to close the windows on my desktop (I have a slower computer, and MPlayer bitches at me about it all the time). In my opinion, no app should ever start fullscreen, but every app should have the ability to go fullscreen quickly and easily after it starts.
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.
All true, however, I don't think it's unreasonable to shoot for a general-purpose way to make./configure && make && make install easier for boobs. Er, newbies. When that is done, building MPlayer will be a breeze. Just point and click what you want to enable or disable, and the app will tell you what's missing. Some work on the configure script for mplayer might help some, I haven't look too closely at it to be sure, though.
Point is, I don't think it's unreasonable that MPlayer shoot for being easy to use by fools and mothers alike. I don't think they have, so far, and I don't know if they will, but I see no reason MPlayer should stay "for advanced users only". That's just where it is *now*.
"You're looking at now. Everything you see there is happening now."
Two applications that do the exact same thing. Most sane people would see that as pointless and redundant. It's a waste of resources.
I've got three words for you:
One Microsoft Way
Re:What about other software?
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Mplayer Revisited
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There is a world of difference between toothpastes competing in a store and the NECESSARY unification of design required for Linux to ever successfully penetrate the desktop market.
All right, OCG, I'll bite this time.:)
We're not dealing with commercial companies competing with each other, but that doesn't mean we're not dealing with groups competing with each other. MPlayer and Xine are in some pretty heated competition, last I heard. Either one of these projects would love to get a one-up over the other. Also, both projects just LOVE to do something that hasn't been done before, and they LOVE to make it work reliably. MPLayer, to my knowledge, is the first Linux movie player to use native win32 codecs to play certain formats, without WINE.
That said, even in the commercial sector, there has always been lots of choices and fighting between different application developers. From the early days when we had more word processors available than we had kilobytes of ram in our computers, that hasn't changed. Why should open source be any different? I'd venture to say that the reason for all the competition is probably just that it is simply a reflection of life in the real world. In all endeavors, everywhere, there is competition. You can't do something without someone saying "I can do that better". Frequently they do it.
You may as well say "Why have all these separate, independent commercial developers? Why not combine all of their efforts into one company that can focus on making the software the best it can be?" But we consider that bad. Why would it be any better if we made it an idealistic utopia? The Linux kernel is as good as it is in part because Linus encourages competition and lets the best code win, and getting better in part because of this.
COmpetition is good. I will concede that there is a point where too much competition indicates the resources are really spread, and some consolidating would be a good thing, but I don't think we've reached that point here. We have two excellent media players, and they're both highly competitive with one another, so they keep getting better. Everybody benefits, no matter how much "wasted effort" you think is there. Shoe me a project that didn't have competition (such as Mozilla, which doesn't have much) that has not stagnated, become bloated, and generally sucked? Fact is, your girlfriend never looks as pretty when she's your wife. Competition is a good thing.
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.
Considering that Windows (all flavors), MS-DOS, Mac OS (any), Amiga Workbench, et al, have ALL done this, then I really don't think users are gonna give a shit about it. The main thing is having the applications install and run out-of-the-box easily, and perform well. Otherwise, we've been dealing with shared library and static library problems for years, we're used to it.
I'd also like to point out that last time I checked, Xine and Mplayer used most of the same libraries to do the same stuff, only using different libraries to do different things.
I haven't played around with MPlayer that much so maybe its something that I can change in the configuration. Currently I am looking for the best movie player for Linux. I am currently using Xine and am quite happy with that however I have noticed a few issues, does anyone have any reasons that another movie player is better for linux. I tried MPlayer on my Linux OS a little while ago and it was dropping some frames. The computer is not that fast however using Xine the movies usually play quite well. All suggestions will be appreciated.
IN my experience, MPlayer is better than xine. Xine, by default, drops frames to keep A/V sync, and mplayer does not do this by default. Mplayer tends to get caught up in the userspace, so if you SUID it it should run better. I have not done this myself. The big advantage I have with Mplayer is actually it's keyboard interface. It does kind of suck sometimes (in a recent build I did Mplayer wouldn't recognize all the keys, but I'm blaming Mandrake for that), but it is really awesome otherwise. MPlayer also has the ability to specify video and sound drivers on the command line. Xine may have it, but since Xine is GUI oriented and mplayer is not, xine has interface issues that mplayer doesn't have (and vice versa, if you don't like command lines). The biggest plus to using mplayer, in my opinion, comes when you associate it with the file extensions it plays. Then you don't need a fancy gui to play movies. You play them directly out of konqueror (or nautilus, or whatever you use).
When it comes down to it, MPlayer and Xine are the two best video players for Linux, so what you really need to do, probably, is spend some time with both of them getting more intimate with them. Then you'll find that one is better than the other, and you may disagree with me.:)
Slashdot Mirror
So the answer to life the universe and everything is a Windows worm? Somehow it is all very clear to me now... :)
Eh? Clear? How? The *answer* is well-known to be 42. It's the *question* that seems to align with the SoBig virus author. :)
His Macintosh gave us a GUI, mouse and pointers. His NeXT machine gave us the World Wide Web. His iMac gave us a simple network appliance. His OS X now gives us a UNIX environment grandparents, moms and teenagers can use.
When the Macintosh came to my house and tried to give me a mouse and a GUI, I told him "It's already been done. GE beat you to it."
When the NeXT machine came to my house to give me the World Wide Web, I told him "a NeXT machine creating the world wide web is like Al Gore inventing the internet. Sorry, but a machine didn't give us the World Wide Web, people did."
When the iMac came to my house to give me a network appliance, I told him "What's the point? I already got a PC, and it works with everyone else's crap. And it cost the same."
When OSX came to my house to tell me that I now have a UNIX environment that grandparents, moms, and teenagers can use, I told him "I've already got Linux. OS X doesn't do anything Linux doesn't do."
Quite a set of lifetime achievements.
Just parallel development. There's fundamentally no difference between Steve jobs and Bill Gates, except that Bill Gates was able to hide during the desktop wars of the '80s, and it was those wars, in fact, that cleared Jobs out of the picture and paved the way for Gates and Co.
[snip] .. you couldn't swing a dead cat around your head .. [snip] .. (sorry cat lovers).
My mommy told me not to play with my food.
I am surprised not to see the PERL GOD, Larry Wall up on that list. He might not be powerful, but he is influential.
Yeah, he's single-handedly responsible for the rise of the python.
Woz was the brains behind Apple, Jobs was the hype.
Logically, then, Woz sucked, and Jobs was the suck.
I'm sure they do, from time to time. But what you should be asking is if they *comprehend* the articles...
Would you mind clarifying that, please?
"Sai - ai - ai - ai - ai - ai -
"mger"
GAWD that song sucks. I haven't heard the rest, though.
he used his gun as a reference point for the diameter of the bore. That kinda makes it even creepier.
Chances are, his dick would have been the only other thing he brought with him that he could measure with, but it wouldn't have told us anything we didn't already know.
Is he gonna compete for the X Prize?
I presume that if he used acetylene instead of gunpowder, it would still not be legal, according to this code? We used to build acetylene cannons when I worked at a muffler shop. :) Those 3" pipes could shoot some shit...
I realize this is a troll, but I'm getting sick of the slashdot stereotype.
After spending all week working hard at a business I've started with a partner, and all week (evenings) playing with my 3 kids and flirting with my wife (after 3 kids you don't have sex anymore, you just flirt), I'm relaxing. I'm looking forward to cleaning up the yard tomorrow hoping to chase off the field mouse that has recently arrived, and to prepare the yard for winter. It's going to be a long, hard weekend, and I'm happy to relax on a Friday night and read slashdot.
You're welcome.
I wanted to thank you for giving the link to the US war crimes document. I've been wanting my wife to read it for awhile (we've been starting to follow the primaries and are looking at the candidates for all the things we don't like about the Bush family, so having this information will certainly help), but I couldn't remember where I found the link originally. When I read this reply of yours I clicked on the link, curious to see if it was the document, and lo and behold, it was. So I sent the link to my wife so she can check it out herself, now. :)
I hope you're not insinuating that mplayer is faultless.
Eh? Not at all. If you read any of the rest of this discussion, you may have stumbled across posts where I agreed with problems with MPlayer and even added my own.
I can see that, but you didn't present the information as personal experience
Let's go over some of the phrases and sentences in my original post, shall we?
I made every attempt to show that I was presenting subjective experiences and not objective experiences. Really, with all the trash you've been talking about reading, perhaps you should practice what you preach.
You probably keep your eyes tightly shut, or read very selectively, otherwise i can't explain how you can miss the big honking Documentation link on their webpage.
There is one particular piece of information I have yet to convey. I have not used Xine except as the rpm provided with Mandrake. I have never looked at their website. I haven't needed to. The Xine packaged with Mandrake runs great out of the box, and I've never needed to go looking for documentation for it. I did not like the interface(s) provided, and I didn't like some of the other things. I saw a link to MPlayer from a discussion here in slashdot and went to check it out, and that's how I started with MPlayer.
Now, to close, I'll leave you with two quotes from this most recent post of yours. This should safely leave four fingers of your own pointing back at you.
So much for objective comments...
You probably keep your eyes tightly shut, or read very selectively,
Why don't you list some Free Software projects where everybody came together as friends and focussed on building the best package they could, in the presence of absolutely no competition, and succeeded in building a piece of software that makes everybody who uses it happy.
Just one will probably suffice.
In the meantime, consider these projects:
GNU/Hurd
Mozilla
GNU/Hurd didn't have any Free competition until Linux came along, and they didn't take Linux seriously as competition. Now GNU still doesn't have a kernel that can be considered competitive, and everybody came together as one to build that kernel. You *could* argue that Linux pulled people who would otherwise have worked on Hurd, (or whatever GNUs kernel was called at the time). You could also argue that RMS chased them off by saying things like "you moron. Come back when you have a clue ready."
Mozilla has been a dismal failure, although it is an excellent browser and an excellent development library. But since we waited 4 years for the shiny happy group of people united to make one really good browser, it's mostly irrelevant. Perhaps things would have been different if they had had competition? Perhaps things would have been different if they had accepted that IE was their competition?
You can control xine-ui with keyboard shortcuts as well. Moreover, there is a text-mode interface that you can use if you don't like the GUIs.
It's been unreliable on my system. In fact, Xine has generally been unreliable on my system. Nevertheless, it gets used fairly regularly, so it's not like I never use it. The fact that I don't like the GUI isn't a general problem with GUIs, it's a problem specifically with Xine's, and it's independent of skin. Buttons mysteriously stop working, volume being one of them. I also have a problem with the fact that Xine's volume button is independent of the mixer device. MPlayer uses the mixer directly, so if my wife watches a movie with MPlayer, and turns the volume down so it doesn't wake up the baby, then I have to open aumix (or another mixer) to restore the volume for Xine to play the sound audibly.
Read the docs before making uninformed comments.
Dude, my comment wasn't uninformed. I was trying to provide what I had experienced to another poster. Such rudeness is not needed.
Xine does have it. It's the -V and -A switches.
LIke I said, Xine may have it. THerefore:
Please read the docs.
YOu use "please", but don't come off at all being polite or helpful.
That's ridiculous. You can associate extensions with any player, and the results are similar.
I said:
On my system, Xine takes about 5 seconds to start up when you click on a movie file. MPlayer starts up in less than 1 second. Also, after starting, Xine takes another 2-4 seconds to start the movie. I suppose it's filling it's buffers. MPlayer starts the movie immediately upon opening the window. Xine really does choke on about 1/3 of my movie collection, whereas I have not yet found a file MPlayer couldn't play. I'm not saying there aren't any, I'm only saying that it has played everything I've thrown at it, including stuff that high-dollar windows media players (and WiMP) couldn't play.
If it weren't for the tone of your post, I'd probably be more inclined to--as you say--read the docs for Xine, but I must say that you have completely failed to convince me I should bother. Mplayer's man page tells me everything I've needed to know, and quickly. I've never even seen docs for Xine.
Beautiful post, man. The parent outlined a set of impossible to achieve goals, and you showed him how they've already been achieved. Beautiful. And you managed to put your finger on my only serious problem with MPlayer, the fact that it doesn't create ~/.mplayer if it doesn't exist. I think it should also create default config files in that directory, possibly just copying a default from its base, that are well-commented enough that I can hack them without having to read the documentation, but not expect shit to work unless I read the docs.
Who should that install process be "easy" for? If I find it easy and you do not, is it easy enough? Should my Mother be able to install it? Even though the complexities of the program are too difficult for her to understand?
I would define an easy install as "You can try to do it without reading the instructions, but don't expect shit to work. You can read the instructions, follow them to the letter, and everything works as expected."
IN my experience, MPlayer is one of the easiest projects to install from source (Audacity coming in about even, possibly easier). Just because you don't get some fake wannabe installshield installer doesn't mean the installation is hard.
In MPlayer's case, it is my honest opinion, that the compilation process is mostly as easy as it can be given the circumstances. MPlayer combines software modules from countless sources and makes it all play nice inside one little binary. I think the complexity of the situation awards some understanding.
I have never failed to successfully install mplayer by reading the instructions. I've even gotten to where I don't read the instructions anymore, I've done it enough times and it doesn't change *that* much. Really, the only bitch I see about MPlayer's install is the same bitch about installing software distributed as source: using the commandline. While I think there can be some improvement, I still don't see any reason installing software has to be graphical. Why is it so unreasonable to expect people to use the command line to install software? That's something you don't do every day. Most people don't even install software every week. Hell, it's been months since I installed a new piece of software on my computer. Installing software is part of administering your computer. It's not something idiot end-users should be doing all the time. It *is* something that requires a little bit of understanding, the kind of understanding that can be gained by reading the instructions. If a user can't be relied on the read the instructions, what can he be relied on to do? Is he going to not read the instructions and then DoS the mailing list with questions that are answered in the instructions? Users all the time complain that the documentation isn't good enough, but do really take the time to read the fucking manual? Or do they just glance through, look at the index/table of contents, and then bitch that it's not good enough?
That said, documentation is one place MPlayer can use improvement. The answers are in the docs, but they can be pretty hard to find occasionally. Soon I'm going to start working on making svcds again, and I'm going to use MPlayer for it. When I get it down and I know what I'm doing, I'm going to write up my experiences and try to create a guide for idiots to make svcds under Linux. There are several available, but none of them hit the mark quite right. All of them are useful, however.
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".
While you did an excellent job summarizing the points, Eric S. Raymond wrote an article that I found particularly helpful, and after reading and putting into practice what he was saying (all of which made sense) i started getting a lot more help from projects, and was actually able to contribute a lot more in general. Much more satisfying, I say.
See? You get a program that does what each one of the seperate programs do best, and only one install routine.
Um, isn't the UNIX philosophy having a bunch of small applications that each only do one thing, and do it really well?
Now.. what if all three groups combined their resources and put the best parts of each into one GOOD program?
YOu say that, but we've already seen this crap in action. How much better has Internet Explorer gotten since Microsoft dominated the web browser? How much better has outlook express gotten since microsoft dominated email clients? We've seen very little improvement in many applications that exist as the sole application in its environment that does what it does (sole means > 90% users). Instead, they stagnate, without improvement. Is this what you want to have happen to free software?
or you can put fs=yes in your .mplayer/config...or when it starts, hit "f".
I've got mplayer -framedrop -zoom associated with most video types in Konqueror, so I prefer to hit "f" when it starts. Frequent mistakes clicking the wrong movie. Also, sometimes I take advantage of opening credits and stuff to close the windows on my desktop (I have a slower computer, and MPlayer bitches at me about it all the time). In my opinion, no app should ever start fullscreen, but every app should have the ability to go fullscreen quickly and easily after it starts.
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.
All true, however, I don't think it's unreasonable to shoot for a general-purpose way to make ./configure && make && make install easier for boobs. Er, newbies. When that is done, building MPlayer will be a breeze. Just point and click what you want to enable or disable, and the app will tell you what's missing. Some work on the configure script for mplayer might help some, I haven't look too closely at it to be sure, though.
Point is, I don't think it's unreasonable that MPlayer shoot for being easy to use by fools and mothers alike. I don't think they have, so far, and I don't know if they will, but I see no reason MPlayer should stay "for advanced users only". That's just where it is *now*.
"You're looking at now. Everything you see there is happening now."
"What happened to then?"
etc.
Two applications that do the exact same thing. Most sane people would see that as pointless and redundant. It's a waste of resources.
I've got three words for you:
One Microsoft Way
There is a world of difference between toothpastes competing in a store and the NECESSARY unification of design required for Linux to ever successfully penetrate the desktop market.
All right, OCG, I'll bite this time. :)
We're not dealing with commercial companies competing with each other, but that doesn't mean we're not dealing with groups competing with each other. MPlayer and Xine are in some pretty heated competition, last I heard. Either one of these projects would love to get a one-up over the other. Also, both projects just LOVE to do something that hasn't been done before, and they LOVE to make it work reliably. MPLayer, to my knowledge, is the first Linux movie player to use native win32 codecs to play certain formats, without WINE.
That said, even in the commercial sector, there has always been lots of choices and fighting between different application developers. From the early days when we had more word processors available than we had kilobytes of ram in our computers, that hasn't changed. Why should open source be any different? I'd venture to say that the reason for all the competition is probably just that it is simply a reflection of life in the real world. In all endeavors, everywhere, there is competition. You can't do something without someone saying "I can do that better". Frequently they do it.
You may as well say "Why have all these separate, independent commercial developers? Why not combine all of their efforts into one company that can focus on making the software the best it can be?" But we consider that bad. Why would it be any better if we made it an idealistic utopia? The Linux kernel is as good as it is in part because Linus encourages competition and lets the best code win, and getting better in part because of this.
COmpetition is good. I will concede that there is a point where too much competition indicates the resources are really spread, and some consolidating would be a good thing, but I don't think we've reached that point here. We have two excellent media players, and they're both highly competitive with one another, so they keep getting better. Everybody benefits, no matter how much "wasted effort" you think is there. Shoe me a project that didn't have competition (such as Mozilla, which doesn't have much) that has not stagnated, become bloated, and generally sucked? Fact is, your girlfriend never looks as pretty when she's your wife. Competition is a good thing.
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.
Considering that Windows (all flavors), MS-DOS, Mac OS (any), Amiga Workbench, et al, have ALL done this, then I really don't think users are gonna give a shit about it. The main thing is having the applications install and run out-of-the-box easily, and perform well. Otherwise, we've been dealing with shared library and static library problems for years, we're used to it.
I'd also like to point out that last time I checked, Xine and Mplayer used most of the same libraries to do the same stuff, only using different libraries to do different things.
I haven't played around with MPlayer that much so maybe its something that I can change in the configuration. Currently I am looking for the best movie player for Linux. I am currently using Xine and am quite happy with that however I have noticed a few issues, does anyone have any reasons that another movie player is better for linux. I tried MPlayer on my Linux OS a little while ago and it was dropping some frames. The computer is not that fast however using Xine the movies usually play quite well. All suggestions will be appreciated.
IN my experience, MPlayer is better than xine. Xine, by default, drops frames to keep A/V sync, and mplayer does not do this by default. Mplayer tends to get caught up in the userspace, so if you SUID it it should run better. I have not done this myself. The big advantage I have with Mplayer is actually it's keyboard interface. It does kind of suck sometimes (in a recent build I did Mplayer wouldn't recognize all the keys, but I'm blaming Mandrake for that), but it is really awesome otherwise. MPlayer also has the ability to specify video and sound drivers on the command line. Xine may have it, but since Xine is GUI oriented and mplayer is not, xine has interface issues that mplayer doesn't have (and vice versa, if you don't like command lines). The biggest plus to using mplayer, in my opinion, comes when you associate it with the file extensions it plays. Then you don't need a fancy gui to play movies. You play them directly out of konqueror (or nautilus, or whatever you use).
When it comes down to it, MPlayer and Xine are the two best video players for Linux, so what you really need to do, probably, is spend some time with both of them getting more intimate with them. Then you'll find that one is better than the other, and you may disagree with me. :)