[MPlayer-users] The future of mplayer

[Juho Vähä-Herttua]

Hello,

I wish you would read this whole mail, I'd appreciate it really.

Before I start I should maybe tell something about myself. I have used 
mplayer actively for about a year and I've seen it growing. I'm not very 
advanced coder, I've been mostly sending patches to programs like 
X-CD-Roast etc. I think I have a quite good image of what a good media 
player should be like. I also have discussed about your mplayer software 
numerous of times in IRC and other forums with other users.

First of all, I read that whole thread (at least I think so) in debian 
mailing list and I was really disappointed. In both of you. Both sides 
had good points but neither of you cared about it. Both just 
concentrated on insulting each other... And yes, I think Gabucino really 
_was_ flaming there. And it's just useless to dig up old arguments of 
distributing binary material. What's past is past and legal issues about 
that whole thing are unsure. But it's gone now and no one got sued so 
why argue?

You have a great piece of software there, now don't spoil it please. I 
always appreciate good ideas, for example when decided not to use 
multiple processes you had my full support. I understand why you are 
using only one and it's a good thing for performance. But there are some 
other things that I don't understand. Now I'm not trying to offend 
anyone, I'm just giving you some ideas of what could be done to mplayer.

First of all, the debian guys were right. Your program is not really 
distributable in binary form. First of all it should be possible to 
easily add new codecs to program without recompiling it. Maybe you 
should develop some good interface between the player and the codec 
modules? It doesn't work this way. And the same thing in different 
output drivers, you should be able to change them without recompiling...

And then mencoder... Can't you just make two separate programs, mencoder 
and mplayer? I see no relation between these two (than the same codebase 
maybe) and in my opinion transcode is closer to the way I would like to 
see it done. Now this whole mplayer/mencoder package is some strange 
hybrid.

Third thing is that you have to cut off some features, it just can't go 
on like this. For example mplayer is now in release candidate mode and 
still you guys are putting in some new features. Every coder should know 
that when a program is in bugfixing mode implementing of new features 
should be minimal. 

You should clean the code now, make it more modular and think what 
people _really_ need. They need a good media player alright and you have 
succeeded better than others, still your usability just sucks. I 
consider myself as quite advanced linux user and still I have to do a 
lot of work just to make my mplayer work the way I want it to. This is 
not the right way.

Hmm, now I have to maybe try to tune my mplayer again because after 
updating to rc3 I got my radeon xvidix driver broken. In rc2 xvidix 
driver was more or less not usable because of the flickering in 
subtitles etc. You know, these things are frustrating no matter how 
advanced you are...

Now you have to understand that I have told you only about bad things of 
mplayer in this mail. There are lots of good features and I really like 
this software. (why would I have used it for a year otherwise?-) But 
don't be so naïve and lose time in arguing. You have a nice software now 
and I think you really should concentrate on usability problems instead 
of new features. MPlayer already has enough features, that should not be 
a problem.

R.S.V.P.


Best regards,

Juho Vähä-Herttua
Karkkila, Finland