[MPlayer-users] Why -endpos does not work in mplayer, but only in mencoder? And general Mplayer/gstreamer stuff. Was: MPlayer-users Digest, Vol 21, Issue 65

[Jouni.Lohikoski@iki.fi]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2005 at 06:00:28PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> Having -endpos would not help, since -dumpstream happens at the STREAM
> layer. The timestamps are only seen at the demuxer layer which is not
> even loaded.

Maybe some rethinking should be done, or should there be
(yet) another option for -dumpendpos <size_in_kiB_MiB_GiB> ?
mplayer surely easily would know how much it has written/dumped to the
file.

> > Also seems like when the stream has a time stamp, and it has been dumped
> > to a file, -ss position does not work according to the index. Is there
> 
> What index?

I mean the time stamp in the WMV9 stream. It can be a real time clock,
or the time since the WMVSERVER was last reset (if the admin is too lazy
to set the timer value to the real time)

> > 24/7 streams often has a real UTC clock
> > ticking along with the stream. So for example a dumped stream may be
> > from 13:00:05 to 18:23:16. Only way is to calculate (18:23:16 - 13:00:05)
> > outside of mplayer and work from that?
> 
> It's a limitation of mpeg. The only way to seek to a given timestamp
> is linear search (slow as hell and thus not supported).

The dumped stream is WMV9 stream and so is in ASF file format.
When I use -ss, it counts as the start of the video would have
"00:00:00", but the overlay onscreen display in Mplayer shows the time 
stamp for example starts from "13:00:05" and is to "18:23:16". So one cannot
set the position to 5pm just by -ss 17:00:00, but one has to calculate
first (17:00:00 - 13:00:05) and then -ss 03:59:55

> > Is there any project, which would try to port every codecs and features
> > of MPlayer in to Gstreamer framework? Or convert MPlayer to be on top of
> > the gstreamer framework? < http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/ >
> 
> ROTFL! gstreamer is a complete joke. :)

As an general idea or totally from the basic thought?
To me it would be ideal to be able to combine N*N different systems from 
separate components; codecs, streams, fileformats, devices and all would
follow some common framework. Or do you also think everything else also done
inside freedesktop.org is useless and a joke?

The monolithic design in MPlayer has become too messy to maintain, it
often seems.