[MPlayer-dev-eng] mms:// saying "Core dumped ;)"

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Tuesday, 21 September 2004 at 00:42, rcooley wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 15:58:44 -0400
> The Wanderer <inverseparadox at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> > considerable number of users for whom this is just plain not either
> > clear or user-friendly? 
> 
> Some number of users just seem to be confused by EVERYTHING.  It doesn't
> matter to them that the encoding process worked flawlessly, the fact
> that "frameno.avi" or "codecs.conf" was "not found" will drive them
> crazy...
>
> I don't think that this message is any more confusing than the rest. 
> Changing this single message won't solve the problem... You'd need to
> change mplayer so it doesn't output any non-fatal messages at all, by
> default.  That's about the only thing that would make mplayer less
> confusing for the mindless masses.

I agree.

This is a point worth considering. Remembering that a part of unix
tradition is the "if everything went well, don't output anything"
behaviour, MPlayer is way too verbose. I'd vote for leaving _only_ the
progress/status bar and some essential information, i.e. (sample output):

$ mplayer sample.avi
Video Output: X11/Xv
Audio Output: OSS/ioctl audio output

Playing: /home/user/sample.avi
Title: Sample movie
Software: MEncoder-1.0pre5-3.3.3
Author: Me

A:   2,8 V:   2,8 A-V: -0,001 ct:  0,001   70/ 70   5%  3%  0,8% 0 0 91%
Done.

And that's it. What do you think?

> And that's just a start...  You also need to make "-idx" a default,

I believe MPlayer outputs something about -idx if you try to seek in a file
without an index.

> add "-zoom" when a driver doesn't have hardware scaling,

Such driver (X11? DGA?) could output a small informational text, saying:
"Hardware scaling unavailable, use -zoom for software scaling (SLOW)".

> and many more "friendly" changes like that.

Not that many. And they would make the learning curve a bit less steep
for some users.

> And I don't even want to think about how many changes it will take to
> make Mencoder idiot-friendly!

ACK, let's leave MEncoder alone.

R.

-- 
MPlayer RPMs maintainer: http://greysector.rangers.eu.org/mplayer/
"I am Grey. I stand between the candle and the star. We are Grey.
 We stand between the darkness ... and the light."
        -- Delenn in Grey Council in Babylon 5:"Babylon Squared"