[MPlayer-dev-eng] MPlayer vs. mplayer2 status?

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 09:37:15AM +0200, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
> Let me ask straight: is mplayer2 "the future", sth me should start
> switching to? Do developers suggest switching to mplayer2? Do you
> expect this to receive most of the new features, while MPlayer will
> receive mostly bug fixes?
> 
> Or are that two projects in competition? Should we still try hardly to
> fix bugs in MPlayer and develop it?

For the short on patience: yes. But don't expect me to take the word
"competition" in my mouth, I'm not going to get involved in that kind
of thing in my freetime.

> Could you post some summary to end-users, please?

I do not intend to work on mplayer2, both development style and partially
goals are such I do not want to spend my freetime on it (though to my
knowledge at least for now it will in many cases profit from fixes to
MPlayer by pulling changes).
Other developers are of course making their own decisions but there
are at least several who mostly share my sentiment.
I intend to work on MPlayer, both fixes and new features, as long as
there are users who are interested (or it's something I'm interested in,
but honestly MPlayer works far too well for me already to give me
much reason to do anything).
Though as for features really the majority of work is and should be
done in FFmpeg. Well, for the kind of features I care most about.
A good part of the ongoing work is moving code to FFmpeg so it becomes
more powerful and easier to use, allowing far more users to profit from
it than just MPlayer and reducing our maintainance burden.
We also have a very active developer working on the GUI which no longer
exists in mplayer2.
mencoder is a bit more "desparate" (though it's not completely unmaintained,
but it's not at a point where you can expect it to become much better),
though it does not exist in mplayer2 at all and the suggestion I guess
is trying to move to FFmpeg, in the longer term at least.