[MPlayer-dev-eng] Utilize libunrar.so/unrar.dll?

[Rich Felker]

On Sat, Oct 22, 2005 at 01:29:26PM +0800, Zuxy wrote:
> 2005/10/22, Rich Felker <dalias at aerifal.cx>:
> > I'm against supporting win32 dlls too, but especially against this
> > 'feature' which (unlike win32 codec support) is totally useless. If
> > people want to play these subs they can just use the external unrar
> > binary first.
> 
> Firstly, whether it's useless to all or not doesn't come from your
> imagination. Most DVDRips are tuned to have a size that just fits into
> a 700MB CD-R, and if you don't rar the subs you have to overburn a
> lot.

Then unrar it and recompress with rar2 (which is already supported) or
gzip or anything else.. Or (much better idea) OCR it and rm the shitty
vobsubs and replace them with a text sub format.

> Lastly, why don't you go further by telling people not to use real,
> quick time, or any formats that can't be decoded without a win32 dll?

I do, however this functionality is already there and ripping it out
would not be too popular. :) But there's a huge difference too. With
rar3, there's an external very-small program you can use to extract
the data to a usable format. With proprietary codecs there's nothing
to extract the data into a proper format yet, and even if there were
the conversion would be highly destructive (as opposed to lossless).

> > unrar3 has source anyway, so if you insist on having rar3 support in
> > MPlayer, read the source and then write an independent implementation
> > of the decompresser under some free license..
> 
> That's absolutely not my job. If you prefer the old, out dated,
> virtually useless UniquE RAR you just keep it in the next release, and
> tell rippers to use rar 2.0 only, if you can.

What the ripper uses is irrelevant. It's trivial to convert to any
format since this is plain lossless compression.

In any case, linking rar code to MPlayer is not GPL compatible. If you
want it done, we need an independent implementation...

Rich