[MPlayer-users] Quicktime playback on MPlayer/Linux --Somevideos play in ultra-slow-motion?

[Phil Rhodes]

Get off your high horse; you are presumptive and arrogant. Being a software 
engineer does not make you better than everyone else, despite the 
all-too-common presumption that it does. This brings me ineluctibly back to 
a discussion in the archives of this very mailing list concerning SMPTE 
drop-frame timecode, which one of the developers wanted out because he 
thought it was "untidy". He was wrong; laughably wrong, so obviously wrong 
that it was actively humorous to see it in someone working on a 
video-related project, but of course he knew everything about everyone's 
technology because he was a software engineer and obviously, they know 
absolutely everything about absolutely everything. Good grief...

I am, for the record, an engineer in the film and TV industry.

> If the software you choose to install on your system does not work, it is 
> nobody's
> fault but your own. Be thankful that there are people that are kind enough 
> to
> share their hard labor with you for no cost at all.

Yes, yes, you are correctly performing all the tired old cliches of Linux 
arguments.

First it was: "It works! It's great!"

Now, having been confronted with how crappy it is, it's: "Oh, uh, well, it 
might kinda work, but er, we never said it would, OK!"

I say again: I will happily pay Windows money for a Linux distro with 
Windows functionality. It does not exist; there seems to be no desire to 
make it exist.

Which is absolutely fine. Nobody's being paid here. And this is perfectly 
sensible until people start screaming "ready for the desktop!" or "the 
deployment procedure works!". It is not ready for the desktop; the 
deployment procedures don't often work. You can have your lovely egalitarian 
opensource tree-hugging or you can have successful, usable, high-quality 
software; you cannot have both.

> Then discover bug in software... then ... what then?

You really didn't want to go there. When was the last checkin to fix the 
many, many bugs in the slave mode command system? It will never get fixed, 
because it's not "fun to work on", I suspect; and that's fine, that's your 
choice, but you can't take that position, then try to hold this piece of 
software up as a paragon of virtue. This happens constantly in opensource; 
boring-to-implement but essential features are overlooked. There is no 
commercial imperative; no revenue stream dependent upon the software's 
features or performance.

There is in short no reason to make it work at all - so don't pretend it 
does when it so patently doesn't - and not only doesn't work now, but can 
probably never be made to work given the hellish political limbo in which 
the developers are forced to operate.

So tell me again, all this being the case, why exactly do you bother?

P