[MPlayer-users] audiodump: -vc dummy versus -vc null

[Joe Friedrichsen]

Rich Felker wrote:

>On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 11:47:38PM +0900, Joe Friedrichsen wrote:
>
>>A recent post 
>>(http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.mplayer.user/39677) piqued my 
>>curiosity about -vc dummy when dumping audio from videos. Incidentally, 
>>"dummy" is not listed for $mplayer -vc help.
>>
>
>That's exactly the point. You force it to try a codec name that
>doesn't exist, and when it fails, no video decoder will get loaded and
>video is fully disabled.
>
Gotcha. so "-vc tortoise" would have the same effect. This begs the 
question then, how can you properly disable video altogether?

>>(1) Why is -vc null recommended over -vc dummy for audio dumping even 
>>though -vc dummy is faster?
>>
>
>Because it crashes with many demuxers. Read the thread where it was
>changed again -- apparently you missed the whole point of it. :)
>
I only read about why -vo null is labeled as "crashing" - so that 
mplayer wouldn't select it automatically after other codecs failed (so 
that users could see an error message and go about fixing their 
problem). It's kind of ironic that the same label works for the users as 
well: they don't automatically select -vo null because they think it'll 
crash (when apparently it's using -vc dummy that will lead to more crashes).

I didn't read anything about why there was a 'change' to -vc null, or 
that there even was a change at all. It appears to have been there from 
the beginning...

Joe