[MPlayer-cygwin] MPlayer GUI?

[Diego Biurrun]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2005 at 09:42:12PM +0200, Sascha Sommer wrote:
> On Sunday 10 July 2005 19:27, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> >
> > I also feel that inconvenience and have been bugging a certain person to
> > consider merging the Windows port of the GUI.  However that certain
> > person - let's call him Samuel Winter for now - has refused to listen to
> > my pleas time and time again.  I have numerous witnesses for the fact
> > that he refused booting Windows to have even so much as a short look at
> > the Windows port of the GUI.  Sad indeed are the days when the Windows
> > maintainer has no more mercy with all those poor Windows users and
> > leaves them to using the command line or *shudder* WMP.
> >
> > But there is hope for you now that you have left that OS with the
> > devilish maintainer behind.  Go, live happily and prosper in the land of
> > the penguin, in MS-land Winter reigns with a cold heart.  May god have
> > mercy with the poor souls that cannot escape from his dominion...
> 
> Time to play devils defender and give you some background knowledge ;):

:-)

> A long time a fellow windows user called Samuel Winter, wanted to playback 
> videos on his parents computers, just like all the other cool kids did back 
> then. However his computer was so damn slow that WMP would take ages to start 
> up and playback wasn't fluent either. Back then he stumbled over a small, 
> fast developing project for an alternative OS. An alternative OS that had 
> been lying on his harddisc for a long time already but was almost useless for 
> our poor windows user.

That was indeed the winter of Winter's soul..

> As time passed by, Samuel learned how to compile this little program and 
> subscribed to the projects mailinglists. He was fascinated by the developers, 
> who have been working really hard to make this player the best movie player 
> on linux. Sadly nvidia refused to write good drivers for Samuels graphics 
> card and MPlayer and this alternative OS were still useless for video 
> playback.

Yes, I remember those bleak days when multimedia on Linux was still
lagging far behind other operating systems...

> But there was hope.

As there is nowadays ;)

> Atmosfear, one of these crazy MPlayer developers, did an experimental windows 
> port, that would allow Samuel to use the accelerated graphics card drivers on 
> windows so he would finally be able to watch a few videos.
> However there were still a few problems left. MPlayer was by far not as rock 
> solid on windows as it was on linux, therefore Atmosfear requested a native 
> video output driver on the MPlayer wishlist.
> As noone else seemed to be interested Samuel, spent his free time learning C.
> And half year later, he submitted an almost working video output module for 
> windows to the MPlayer list. It has been a big advantage that noone cared 
> about windows back then, because the driver got into cvs without anyone 
> noticing that Samuel really didn't know C when he started it...

Hehe :)  But it did it's job, I remember it well.  Maybe not good, but
good enough...

> As time passed by, Samuel wrote some more code and more and more people became 
> interested into the windows port.

And one of these people was the author of these lines that fed Samuel
Winter countless bug reports and helped port MPlayer to W2K with dutiful
testing and a few small fixes...

> Meanwhile, Samuel also got another computer 
> which had better graphics card support on this alternative OS, called Linux.
> It was time to forget about windows in order to switch to Linux.
> Now in 2005, Samuel even took the time to travel to the linuxtag in Karlsruhe 
> Germany, where there would be a big MPlayer booth and many more people using 
> the free operating system linux. Isn't it great to choose the operating 
> system you want? Yes, it is. But Samuel wasn't as free as all the other 
> people there. There always were these silent voices around him. Trying to 
> influence him with the pretext of testing a few windows guis, 2 words were 
> repeated over and over again: "Boot windows" "Boot windows" "Boot windows"
> Samuel had to be strong, but the voices continued. "I can't do it", "You have 
> to do it". "I have a powerbook".

Isn't it great?  A non-x86 machine provides almost 100% Windows protection :)

> Well in the end Samuel did it nevertheless 
> and it wasn't as shocking as he thought it might be. The windows guis really 
> looked great and he promised to take a look at it. As usuall Samuel didn't 
> give an exact time plan, knowing he would be busy for the next weeks. Oh 
> right yes, I think he even has to write a test about C and C++ tomorrow, and 
> other tests on wednesday and friday. Maybe he finds the time to look at the 
> windows gui problem afterwards.
> 
> Dear windows users, voices from the dark side.
> If you want to have something done fast, do it yourself. I'm busy for the next 
> week ;) 

The week is over, so users, be unafraid of the dark side and inquire
Samuel Winter what the GUIs look like and whether they are any good...

Diego