[MPlayer-DOCS] manpage and HTML docs - FFmpeg MPEG-4 vs. DivX

[The Wanderer]

Diego Biurrun wrote:

> Josh Varner writes:
> 
>>> Of course, the reason for having the mention there at all is so
>>> that people who don't know what MPEG-4 is but do know what DivX
>>> is will be able to have some understanding of the explanation. I
>>> don't know of any way to accomplish that without also causing the
>>> side effect to which this thread is an objection... the question
>>> then becomes, which of these problems outweighs the other?
> 
> This is precisely the reason why I have not gone out and made the
> requested changes immediately.

I suspected as much, but sometimes it can be useful to state the problem
explicitly; I've seen it help far too many times in the past to refrain
from doing so now. ^_^

>> Would it be possible to add a "Does MPlayer support DivX?" question
>> to the FAQ and then attempt to rectify the problem there, by
>> explaining the difference. If users can't find DivX in the regular
>> documentation it does not seem unreasonable for them to check the
>> FAQ.
> 
> This sounds like a workable compromise.  Could you come up with a
> patch for this?  If it's too much of a hassle, just suggest some text
> and I will add it to the XML FAQ.

Since my previous post, another (better/worse) possible solution has
occurred to me: a phrasing along the lines of "MPEG-4 (for example,
DivX)". The problem with that one is that properly speaking the 'new'
phrasing should be used in every place where the old reference had been
used, and it's long enough to make that clunky at best.

The only reason why I bother to suggest this is that I'm not sure the
FAQ is a viable solution - and that's because I'm not sure your standard
user will necessarily know where to *find* the FAQ; while I could easily
find out, I'm honestly not sure where to look for it offhand, and that's
not exactly conducive to "oh, I'll just have a quick glance at the FAQ
to see if it mentions this". Part of the problem in this respect is that
the FAQ, like much of the rest of the documentation, is no longer
directly available in a format which (TTBOMK) can readily be directly
rendered and thus viewed by near-omnipresent software; there would have
been much less of an issue back before the change from HTML to XML.
Nowadays, I need to remember to go and recompile the documentation
separately every now and then, and I usually don't think of it before I
want to go read some part of the docs - at which point it just seems too
much of a hassle to be worth the effort, so I don't bother doing it, so
I don't read the docs aside from the man page, and the problem recurs
the next time around.

Okay, that was a fair run-on sentence. Still, I think you get what I'm
talking about.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.