[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] Use unrar for open vobsubs if available

[Gianluigi Tiesi]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 07:19:03PM +0800, Ulion wrote:
> 2007/11/24, Reimar Döffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at stud.uni-karlsruhe.de>:
> > Hello,
> > On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 02:50:59PM +0800, Ulion wrote:
> > > We already discussed the libunrar patch, that was linked to mplayer so
> > > it's rejected.
> > > But we can safely use external decompress tool 'unrar' for this purpose.
> >
> > Please before writing a patch search the archives carefully, there were
> > at least three different attempts in the past, we do not need another
> > flawed implementation of the same thing, we need a proper one.
> > And honestly a proper solution will most likely have to clean up the
> > _unspeakable utter and complete mess_ the current code is (the one using
> > unrarlib, well, actually unrarlib itself probably is a mess as well).
> > An additional point is that I am not at all too happy about spending
> > time improving support for a proprietary format, but not
> > reverse-engineering it but instead jumping through all kinds of hoops
> > while not supporting any of the opensource compression formats that
> > would work as well if not better.
> 
> I'd like say, the unrarlib.c is already there, but it only support rar
> 2.* files, since rar 3.* it's been 5 years. If we need not this
> feature, please remove unrarlib.c forever since it's useless. Else
> make this feature to work with current rar files. unrar is free
> opensource tool from offical rarlab, but has license conflict with
> GPL, else libunrar will be a good choice. Then we can still use the
> binary in this way to do it.
> 
> Also let's discuss this feature itself -- "open vobsub files from rar
> file which has same filename part with the media file." Why it's here,
> in mplayer's svn? Because the .sub file is normally large and can be
> compressed to save space, specially for dvdrips (dvdrip normally keeps
> a 700M size per file, to record them in a cd-r with vobsubs, it has to
> be compressed) and on windows the most popular compress tool winrar
> was used to compress these .sub files. Why windows? Because most of
> users in the world is using windows to play videoes. So this is a fact
> that the rar packaged vobsub files is full of the current world. The
> question is whether mplayer would to support this feature. From
> unrarlib.c, I see 'yes' but broken, so I'd like to make it works it in
> an easy way.
> 

unrar is not opensource, and lib that unpacks rar v3 is not compatible
with gpl, a borderline for making compatible is make a standalone lib
__dynamic__ linked and calling a function that does not share
private data with the lib, so let's say rarunpack(filename, destination)
clamav has the same problem, they perhaps searching for a solution
but for sure it's not statically linkable (or add the code inside
mplayer), the only legal way is calling an external process,
yes unsure, so I suggest to remove unrarlib.c that at this point
is useless and make a patch that spawn the unrar process,
but not apply it to upstream.
So if the user want to have rar v3 support is he will known
risks and he need to manually apply the patch

ps: I still don't understand why ppl not switched to 7z

Regards

-- 
Gianluigi Tiesi <sherpya at netfarm.it>
EDP Project Leader
Netfarm S.r.l. - http://www.netfarm.it/
Free Software: http://oss.netfarm.it/