[MPlayer-users] Play-all-or-nothing mode, was: option to avoid & quot; Audio: no sound& quot; ?

[Oliver Seitz]

> 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.

I think we have all agreed 24 hours ago that changing the defaults is 
not acceptable. You may proceed to your next argument now. I'm sure your 
systems are configured perfectly at all times, so you wouldn't have 
noticed the changed default anyway.

Let's now say we have an average embedded system that uses mplayer. It 
shall play one video after the other. Output is via xv and has to be, as 
the hardware doesn't suppurt anything else and the processor is to weak 
to do scaling or colorspace conversion. Now, there's a not foreseen 
operating error by the user, and a second video starts while one is 
still running. xv is occupied and can not play a second video. But the 
sound is configured correctly, so the first video still plays, and the 
sound of two videos is mixed.

I myself would in this case prefer the second video to just fail, and I 
can't see a reason that speaks against a setting which triggers this 
behaviour.

Of course there could be a new swich introduced "-play-all-or-nothing", 
but as I mentioned before, I feel this is to unimportant to justify a 
new switch. You can of course grep the process list and kill mplayers 
until there's only one left.

Greets,
Kiste