[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: [PATCH] Development (Was: Clean up

[Mike Melanson]

On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Arpi wrote:

> i just don't understand why does he play with our code if he finds it really
> ugly and messy and slow and unusable... why doesn't he choose another
> project with nice object-oriented c++ well-indented source + modular design :)

	Probably because MPlayer is the best application doing what it
does and even though it's "really ugly and messy," as you say, it still
shows the most promise. I don't keep up with the competition like I used
to (too busy hacking on MPlayer) but I just checked out Xine last
night. They have a hacker's guide with a section entitled "Adding support
for a new audio/video format (writing a decoder)":
  http://xine.sourceforge.net/hackersguide.html#AEN160
The section is conspicuously blank...:)

	MPlayer has some strong points over some other players, notably,
the flexibility to add more demuxers and decoders which gives it the
potential to be an all-encompassing media player (while all the rest are
content to be restricted to MPEG/AVI/ASF with Win32 codecs). But that
doesn't mean that MPlayer does not have weaknesses, and organization and
style are some places where it falls over. 

-- 
	-Mike Melanson