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

[The Wanderer]

Phil Rhodes wrote:

> 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.

No, it doesn't. I am not a software engineer, and am unlikely ever to 
be. I am (presently) a computer support technician in a public school 
system; I work every day with people who are nearly computer illiterate, 
and I don't think of myself as better than them. (I do find it 
bewildering that they apparently consciously refuse to believe that most 
of what they see me do really isn't that difficult, but that's another 
issue entirely.)

This is, however, not about that. This is about your claim that MPlayer 
compilation and installation is too complicated to work reliably for the 
ordinary user. I have said, and I repeat, that the basic "obtain source 
tree ; ./configure ; make ; make install" procedure works flawlessly for 
me on every computer I've tried it on, without tweaking or customization 
of either the computer or the source tree. Your only response to this 
has been to object to having to obtain and unpack the source tree. Since 
obtaining and unpacking the source tree is essential to even be able to 
run the "./configure ; make ; make install" steps which you said would 
fail miserably in less than absolutely perfect circumstances, I do not 
see how this constitutes a legitimate counterargument.

> 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.

This is getting offtopic, but: have you defined "Windows functionality", 
precisely and with detail?

> 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?

What does this have to do with his question?

What do you do when you find a bug in a closed Windows or MacOS program? 
What are the chances that it will get fixed, in a timely fashion or 
otherwise, and the fix made available to you immediately for free?

In my admittedly somewhat limited experience, the answers are "there is 
nothing worth doing" and "virtually nil".

By contrast, when you find a bug in an open-source program (not even 
specifically a Linux one), you can report it directly to the people who 
write the program, and the chances that it will get fixed in response 
are significantly higher than zero; when a fix does get put in place, 
that fix is then available to you immediately at no charge.

Whether a particular MPlayer bug or set of bugs has gotten attention is 
not relevant to the question of what can be done or can be expected to 
happen when a bug is found in a closed program vs. in an open one. (That 
said, I don't remember any past mention of the bug(s) you're talking 
about, though it's possible that a discussion of them might be where I 
remember your name from in the first place...)

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

For one thing, not all of that is the case, to nearly the extent you 
claim. For another thing, variously because "we like it" and "the effort 
and/or other required investment is worth the return to us".

I use (and administer for use by others) Windows at work, with a 
smattering of Linux where I can sneak it in. I don't utterly loathe it, 
but it's frequently clunky, awkward, and painful to work with.

I use (and administer for myself) Linux at home. I don't absolutely love 
it, but I recall no area in which it has been *more* clunky, awkward, 
and/or painful than Windows, and most of the time - specifically, in the 
user-level areas most people are likely to need to mess with - it's less so.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.