[MPlayer-dev-eng] Native codec removal

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2003 at 12:51:41AM +0100, Jonas Jensen wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 00:10, Roberto Togni wrote:
> > Since mid November MPlayer is using 8BPS, MS rle, MS Video1, Qt RPZA  
> > and QT SMC decoders from libavcodec.
> > 
> > Noone complained or reported any bug, even now that pre3 is out.
> > 
> > So, i'll remove our native decoders in a few days.
> > 
> > If you have any reason to keep them for more time, please let me know.
> 
> IMHO it's a good thing to have more than one codec for a given format.
> The codecs may perform identically on most files, but some day some user
> will try to play a damaged/out-of-spec/weird file, and the "good" codec
> may fail to play it while the "bad" one, by luck, can do it. That leads
> to improvements in the robustness of the good codec.

The lavc ones were direct ports of the MPlayer-native ones, so I don't
think this is possible...

> Another case is when a change is made to the good codec and nobody
> notices that it breaks playback of 5% of all movies. If there isn't a
> bad codec to test against, users will just think that their file is
> broken and the good codec might never get fixed.
> 
> If the only problem with the native codecs is that they take up space, I
> vote for keeping them.

They'll be dropped in G2 anyway, because there's no sense in porting
duplicate code to the G2 architecture.

Rich