[MPlayer-users] option to avoid & quot; Audio: no sound& quot; ?

[Nix]

On 2010.10.23. 02:00, Frederik Eaton wrote:
>
> P.S. For the record, I never proposed to change the default. Maybe a long time
> ago, the default should have been made more sensible, but now it is too late and
> changing it would cause unwarranted amounts of pain. Perhaps the hardest part of
> this discussion might be admitting that the original design of mplayer wasn't
> perfect.
You know, I'm not a developer but I still feel the *RAGE*. MPlayer does 
the sensible thing: play back what it can. To not ignite more 
unproductive mailing/spamming and bad_ideas^TM any further I tried to 
stay quiet for the past 10 hours or so but, really, I think you blew my 
fuse just now.
Let's say we have an average Joe who wants to watch some random video 
file that uses a video or audio codec that FFmpeg doesn't support for 
some reason. Currently MPlayer plays what it can. Average Joe then 
either feels happy with what he gets (there are quite a lot of users 
like that) or understand that he has a problem. Now, in your world this 
ends up slightly differently: instead MPlayer doesn't play anything and 
our poor guy now has a lot worse impression on MPlayer.
Yes, I know that there have been quite a lot of bad/idiotic system 
engineering decisions to support broken systems (I'm talking about 
software and hardware in general) but that's done when that system _has_ 
to be supported. In this case it's one or more likely few systems that 
have not been properly set up or something and, really, the _easiest_ 
(but not the only) proper fix is to install PulseAudio and make it the 
default for everthing. On distros like Ubuntu 10.x that should already 
be done by default and no user intervention should be required, while, 
say, Gentoo relies on the administrator knowing his stuff and making the 
right decisions himself (but that's why it's a professional distro and 
there's nothing wrong with that).
Now less angry,
nix