[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: [xine-devel] Proposal for a common D-Bus interface for media players

[Attila Kinali]

Moin,

On Mon, 04 Dec 2006 15:25:35 -0800
Mike Melanson <mike at multimedia.cx> wrote:

> Allow me to inaugurate the flame war...
> 
> Rafaël Carré wrote:
> > That would let developers use this interface in their programs, and let their users decide of which media player they wanna use. All about FREEDOM.
> 
> I read this as: "Real problems are too hard to solve. Let's create 
> different problems and solve those instead!"

Mike, have i ever told you that i like your humor ? :)

But unfortunately, this time i cannot laugh, because it really shows
where every application around linux is going: bloat.

The unix princimple is to keep things simple with an interface
that makes it easy to interact with other programs. Systems
like D-Bus are great only to communicate machine-local events.
But unfortuntely, people who never learned that there is a
network attached to their machine use D-Bus to communicate
with other applications, although X11 itself already provides
such a facility. Thus because D-Bus is missused for something
it was never meant for, it has tons of troubles with authentication
and networking. (Have i ever mentioned that actualy all gnome
stuff assumes that one has only a single, non-networked
machine with a THz, 256-core CPU, Petabytes of RAM and Zetabytes
of harddisk?)

Not to talk that the D-Bus designers thought that XML is
a great idea to make simple things even more complicated.
(If you really think that XML is the answer, then you
definitly missunderstood the question).

Now to the program in question itself. Although it might seem to be
a good idea to have one common interface to all video player
applications so that one can exchange one for another, it clearly
shows a lack of understanding what differentiates video apps these
days: the user interface.
Although there are still functional differences between the
different apps, the biggest difference lies in the UI and
not in the functionality (i ignore the differences in framework
for this, because the user doesn't care about that anyways).
Thus, unifying the UI would mean to create one Great Unified Video Player.
In the cases i know, the UI is more or less thightly coupled to the
underlying architecture of the player which means that changing
the UI to the GUVP would mean to change the architecture itself.
And i doubt that any developer would want that some outsider
comes and tells him how to design his application.


			Attila Kinali

PS: It'll be soon Linux-Tag time again. Anyone beside
the usual MPlayer and FFmpeg maniacs care to join us
this year at the "Free Video" booth ? :)
-- 
Lotus Notes ist eine verteilte Datenbankapplikation,
als Sample ist eine miese Groupware dabei ;)
                       -- Lukas Beeler