[MPlayer-dev-eng] An attempt at libmplayer

[Attila Kinali]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:31:15 +0530
"Santanu Sinha" <santanu.sinha at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 5:15 PM, Benjamin Zores <ben at geexbox.org> wrote:
> > Though having MPlayer as a library is something I wanted for quite a
> > long time which also has been rejected quite too many times.
> 
> Dear benjamin,
> Any technical reason's for that? If it is about time, i think i can
> manage enough time to do this and keep it in sync with the current
> svn.

There is only one reason for it not being done until now:
All those people who attempted to create a library out of
MPlayer did it only half heartedly and produced something
that was barely working for their and only their application.
None went all the way and made all internal functions of MPlayer
safe to be integreated into a library. After pointing out those
problems everyone just simply disapeared and was never heard of
again.

So, if you really want to build a library out of MPlayer you
have to first get rid of all global variables (though Uoti did
quite a good job there already), make all subsystems reentrant
and thread safe and last but not least, get the changes back to
us so it can be integreated into our repo.

Of course, you dont have to do everything in one big step, but
the end goal should not be forgotten and you have to work closely
together with the people responsible for the various subsystems you
have to touch.

BTW: having MPlayer as a library would be a possible solution
to our long outstanding GUI problem.

				Attila Kinali

-- 
A strange game.
The only winning move is not to play.
			-- Joshua, WarGames