[MPlayer-DOCS] Re: Book on MPlayer

[Sebastian Krämer]

On Friday 10 September 2004 15:01, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> John Mark Walker writes:
> > I am the Acquisitions Editor for No Starch Press. MPlayer is an
> > interesting project, and I've been using the software for at least 3
> > years now. I am trying to figure out if now would be a good time to
> > develop a book on MPlayer. 

MPlayer has become a very popular project indeed so it might be time for a 
book. The question I have (and: Guillaume asked it too, somehow) is what that 
book would/should be about.. what kind of book?
Telling the story about mplayer (and I think it really has one) could only be 
a part. Documentation as such is (at least in english) available for public 
as manpage and online as html. I think there must be some more that reader 
could be interested in, telling something they don't already know. 
Intersting might be some non-standard usages, things like a howto, where 
knowledge could be abstracted from documentation but isn't directly clear as 
such. For example, MEncoder could be an important part of that.

As thinking of the license.. Using Linux, I'm fan of open-source of course. I 
think, the knowledge that we are about to gather for something like this book 
should be free available. Hm, did the topic 'writing a book' also mean making 
money with it? The only reason for that should be to support the MPlayer 
Project itself, but I don't know how much we (and esp. the developers) depend 
on it.. Do we? 

Generally, I'd say: Yes people, letz write that book! :-)  But we should make 
clear first what we are talking about. Also, I'm volunteering to contribute 
as soon as things become clearer (and not before I managed to sync the german 
manpage ;) )

Sebastian

PS: This thread shouldn't die just in the beginning. Let's discuss what 
efforts and benefits it could have and lets collect ideas what a book about 
MPlayer could be about!