[MPlayer-users] Next rc or 1.0 anyone

[Nico Sabbi]

On Friday 27 June 2008 11:48:38 Raimund Berger wrote:
>
> Just to be sure, breaking compilation is the best case. The
> worse/worst is some non obvious issue creeping in which makes you
> spend days/weeks of CPU time producing sub optimal encodings,
> because you don't have the time to thoroughly test each SVN
> snapshot for an arbitrary amount of time, until some dude finds out
> and produces a patch, which on the way of being applied introduces
> some other non obvious issue.

if you use in "production" something you didn't test thouroughly
we can hardly be blamed. Ever heard that "the winning team 
doesn't change" ? 

>
> If you think releases are bad you clearly lack the sense for
> responsibility and the discipline for serious software
> development. This stuff - and especially some basic quality
> control, testing and release management - may be just foolish
> toying around for you, but it could well mean a lot more to others
> who spend serious time, even just as users, on mplayer and possibly
> carelessly introduced, random issues.

your answer is totally out of focus: mplayer is not a (commercial)
software with a clearly stated project or roadmap, nor we have
customers to satisfy or compatilbility constraints with older
versions.
All the development that takes place is supposed to improve mplayer in 
some respect.
If you want something managed more formally look at ffmpeg,
that at least has a series of regression tests to satisfy and API/ABI 
compatibility restrictions.
Finally, if you rely on mencoder for something more serious than
hobbists's games than you have more serious problems to care for 
than the informality of the development of mplayer ;)


>
> That said, and it may have escaped you, mplayer is dead anyway, at
> least as an encoding application. Just follow the dev list for a
> while to understand that there's no real team standing behind this
> being focussed on common goals, and especially nobody who would
> want to make the major effort and take that seriously crippled avi
> centric architecture to the next level.
>
> By now, mplayer (or rather mencoder) seems to be just a bunch of
> hacks which had been piling up for years especially to make avi
> work with modern encoding and container formats. Of course, this
> leads nowhere and I guess the point of non maintainability has been
> reached time ago, which at least makes the frustration among devs a
> little more understandable. The lack of proper release management
> and taking contributors into responsibility is - surely to a major
> part - to blame for this situation.

of course mencoder is hopelessly at a dead-end. It's good enough to do
some toying, but for something better look at ffmpeg.