[MPlayer-dev-eng] [RFC] including x264 with MPlayer tarballs

[Guillaume POIRIER]

Hello,

I'd like to propose including x264 with MPlayer tarballs, the same way
that libavcodec is included now (not exactly like others such as
libmpeg2, libfaad2, liba52, tremor which are more like forks of the
original projects).

x264 is probably the only practical open-source way to encode video in
H264, and it works very well, but it is perhaps not as well known or
widely used as it should be, probably because of the lack of numbered
releases and the lack of packages for most linux distros.

There are several reasons to include it with MPlayer and build it by default:

- having x264 available in mencoder is important because it is among
the highest-quality codecs for a given bitrate, and also because it is
an important new standard which is only going to become more important
as HD becomes more widespread
- x264 is (almost) only useful in combination with mplayer on unix (or
in combination with other software, but not really as a standalone
encoder - it is basically just a codec library, the commandline
frontend is useful for testing only)
- there are no x264 in any major linux distro
- there are no x264 numbered releases (or even tarballs), the only way
to obtain it is with subversion (which is itself not that common)
- because of that, most mplayer/mencoder users are unlikely to end up
with a version of mencoder that has x264

Including x264 should not be create any problems, because it already
builds as a static library, and its API has been relatively stable for
some time now.  One of the x264 developers has volunteered to help
with any work that needs to be done to make this happen.

As always, please keep the flames cool. The idea is really more: "can
it be done".

Best regards,

Guillaume

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