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

[Phil Rhodes]

> 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.

All I can say is that this is not my experience; my failure to respond 
directly on this point is based on a feeling of: is this guy serious? How 
can you take this position when it is so self-evidently not the case? Do you 
USE linux?

I can only speak as I find.

My experience of the configure/make/install thing is that you type it in, it 
spews out page after page of incomprehensible error messages, and fails. So 
you do one command at a time, and spend anything from half an hour to two 
days fixing all the problems each one has. During this time you are roundly 
derided by the creators of the software - as I am being here - for being 
such a dunce as to make this happen, an insult given particular force by the 
tendency of Linux people, as here, to pretend that such problems are 
impossible and unthinkable and can never happen, as opposed to being 
absolutely the norm.

Almost invariably these issues are caused by hardcoded paths or missing 
library source (truly, Linux is the only OS in the world under which 
absolutely everything is monolithic and you end up needing a gig and a half 
of the source code to the universe to create any program whatsoever; then 
again, it is so poorly standardised that dynamic linking is pretty much 
infeasible). It is my direct experience on the basis of at least several 
hundred attempts that the combined first-time success rate of all the 
various Linux software deployment strategies (apt, compilation, rpm, etc) is 
well down into the single digit percentages, and probably under 5%; a 
Windows deployment is probably exactly the inverse. Linux is so bad, so 
hopelessly unreliable, so ludicrously abstruse and hard to work with that 
it's absolutely laughable and if this is not your experience then we simply 
seem to live on different planets, or you are suffering from a politically 
selective memory. Call it an "assertion" if you like. I can only report my 
experience, and that is what it is. I no longer specify Linux for any task 
where I don't know absolutely that the software I need comes preinstalled 
with the OS, because as a very practical matter, adding anything else is 
entirely in the lap of the gods.

It is not really possible to solve these problems because there is 
effectively no standardisation or consistency. The first thing that needs to 
happen to Linux is for all but two or three of the distributions to go away 
so it's actually possible to get things to conform.

P