[MPlayer-cygwin] Some questions about the MinGW port

[Sascha Sommer]

On Wednesday 29 December 2004 12:57, NoiseEHC wrote:
> So the Win32 all-other-player-killer requirements:
> 1. No vidix/opengl/sdl support, only use DirectX

Opengl support doesn't take much space, and it is still helpfull (and usable 
when you have a decent gfx card)

> 2. Sound only via DirectX/fallback to WaweOut

We are already doing this.

> 3. Only video player, no music (NO .wav, .mp3...)

MPlayer is a video player, take the music playback feature as goodie and don't 
use if you don't want to. I won't disable these as MPlayer is my favorite mp3 
player on windows, too and most of the things are needed to decode the audio 
in video files anyway.

> The idea here is that these require quite different UIs.
> 4. No playlists (it is useful only for music)

Still helpfull if your video is split up into multiple parts. cd1, cd2 etc.

> 5. Probably a DirectX test program to build a buggy driver database

I don't think this is necessary. Most of the time the directdraw drivers will 
work just fine. When it doesn't work people can try vidix, but vidix may 
cause a lot of problems and shouldn't be used on productive systems.

> 6. External GUI probably will not be enough since there are no
> fullscreen controls...

I don't see a reason why this won't work.

> 7. A classic player look or at least a skin which has a WIDE position
> slider...
> (It is a common problem with players that they have a so narrow slider
> that it is
> almost impossible to seek in long movies...)

I prefer the seeking with the arrow keys and the mousewheel over any seekbar.

> 8. Optionally save settings for movies
> (It is missing from all of the players. For example one of my movie
> needs higher
> contrast than the default, etc)

Afaik, MPlayer can already do this.

> 9. No encoder

No problem. --disable-mencoder

> 10. Do not use installed codecs only in /codec

If there are no codecs it simply won't use them ;)
No magic needed.

> Does it mean that there should be a Win32 C program which can consume
> the skins? What I thought is
> that there should be a "Classic" Media Player look since many users
> (including me) just want to play
> movies and not to look at beautiful nonrectangular windows...
>

Don't know other windows players let me believe otherwise.
A, although bugyy and old, skinned gui can be found at
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32-beta/old/buggygui/

> I looked at http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net/ and the screenshots
> show a running FireFox window.
> Probably all I should do is to port the build to MinGW.

Not sure, I took a look at the sources and it looked the windows and linux 
firefox plugins are different.

> >>ps:
> >>Why does it need dnahelper.sys? Probably it would not be better than
> >>DirectX.
> >
> >It doesn't need it. dhahelper.sys is only usefull for vidix with shitty
> >hardware, but most of the time vo gl2 and directx are the best vos.
> >Maybe vidix shouldn't even be included in the official builds.
>
> What does shitty hardware mean? Are they unsupported under windows or
> have buggy drivers?
> (for example reported DirectX capabilities do not match hardware...)
>

Yes, but it will almost always work. Though not always the fastest way 
possible.

Sascha