[MPlayer-users] Attitude Anyone?

[gabor]

<random thoughts>
i don't want to pick a fight here, at least because these were written 
by the project owner/hoss/whatever_is_his_title :-), so people can 
interpret it as the official opinion of mplayer-users/devels/whatever..

- i agree that xine is much 'easier' to set up and use for a 
not-advanced-linux-user... you install the rpm files ( btw. mplayer
now has them too) click on xine and it works...

- i think the problem is that people have different opinions about what
should they learn and what not.... and windows makes people a lot 
lazyer.. if you want to use mplayer, you MUST read all the documentation 
( html + manpages ) before posting here...

- but even with that, newbies simply don't know where they made the 
errors... they simply don't know  if the problem is a linux-config 
problem, or something else... there is nothing anyone could do about that...

- but i don't think it's a good idea to drop those people, and make them 
get used to xine .... i know there aren't any business issues or market 
share, so for the developers it's not so important to have users..

- so maybe it would be for the developers not to answer the really 
'stupid' questions... i, and i hope/think many of the mplayer users try 
to answer the questions we can answer... so maybe mplayer developers 
should wait a day or 2 before answering those really stupid ones... or 
ignore them..

- maybe it's not important what i'm writing here.. i just wanted to say 
that people, calm down, isn't it the best when everyone is happy?
   and i'm sure every developer becomes at least a bit happy when they 
see that mplayer is still the most popular software at freshmeat. and 
that popularity is made mostly of users.

-i think my mail is a perfect example of a newbie-mail :-)))
it didn't have any constructive ideas, and it criticizes everything :-)))))

</random thoughts>

gabor

> the main fact: we don't need newbies.
> why?
> - mplayer/mencoder was not 'designed' for them - no nice cool gui,
> userfriendly interface, easy usage...  these tools are for advanced users,
> who prefer commandline over gui, who learnt that writting few line script and
> using it is much more faster than clocking 100 times to set up an encoding.
> who are able to read docs and finetune options and play with very
> experimental options and drivers - newbie just come here and tell us that it
> doesn't work, while we know it well that it doesn't work yet and it's
> written down too
> - newbies won't make patches, help development, tell us constructive
> suggestions, feature requests. they keep asking the most wanted 10 feature
> request while all fof them are impossible at the moment, otherwise we
> would already implement it. advanced users will understand this or start
> coding...
> 
> so, the main question: who the hell wants more newbies? the answer: xine :)
> 
> so, ppl recommending xine for ewbies are right. mplayer is not the best 
> for them. anyway, when they learnt the video/audio basics, what is codec and
> what is Xv, or what tehhell is decss, then they'll move to mplayer because
> they will find it better...