[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: [PATCH] silence the overly verbose mov demuxer

[gabor]

Ivan Kalvachev wrote:
> 2006/3/8, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski <dominik at rangers.eu.org>:
>> On Wednesday, 08 March 2006 at 14:52, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 03:05:13PM +0200, Ivan Kalvachev wrote:
>>>> 2006/3/7, Diego Biurrun <diego at biurrun.de>:
>>>>> On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 11:24:36PM +0100, Roberto Togni wrote:
>>>>>> And i fail to see why users should be annoyed by mplayer console
>>>>>> messages.
>>>>> It's a simple matter of psychology.  If MPlayer prints out a lot of
>>>>> gibberish people cannot understand they just ignore all of it.  Nobody
>>>>> will bother to read through it to find the interesting pieces.  That's
>>>>> why output should be terse by default so that the important and
>>>>> interesting pieces get noticed.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'll give you an example: Do you read licenses and EULAs top to bottom?
>>>>> How many people really do?  Most have a look at it, see it is
>>>>> unintelligible and uninteresting legalese and skip it completely...
>>>> Even if nobody reads the EULA, it is still displayed.
>>>>
>>>> I believe that a lot of people spoken that they prefer to have some
>>>> output they could ignore than not have it when they need it.
>>>>
>>>> So, let be more constructive. What info should the demuxer output by default.
>>>>
>>>> - subtype of file (avi1.0, ODML; MOV, QT etc...)
>>>> - info (author, name, copyright etc... text data)
>>>> - number of streams
>>>>
>>>> for each stream:
>>>> - type of stream (audio,video,subtitle,unknow).
>>>> - length of stream (if available)
>>>> - way to access the stream (s/alang, s/a/vid)
>>>> - fourcc, long description (e.g. Fourcc: SVQ3  Codec: 'Sorenson Video 3' )
>>>>
>>>> Do I miss something?
>>> which demuxer, codec and vo is being used maybe
>> What I said earlier, i.e. resolution, bitrate, fps for video streams and
>> sampling rate, number of channels and bitrate for audio streams (similarly
>> to what it's like now).
> 
> I was thinking that this info is redundant because we can later see it
> when codecs are started. But in case you have multiple streams with
> different quality, it indeed could be handy.
>

(sorry to jump into a devel discussion ..)
.
i think maybe a use-case based approach would be better there to decide 
what should be displayed and what not.

examples (for a as-little-information-as-possible "profile"):

1. have mplayer to play an mp3 file
	- if everything is ok, i want absolutely no info about the file or 
about the codec used. maybe i want a progress bar to indicate the 
position in the file
	- if mplayer failed to play the file, i want info about it
	- if mplayer had to find out that the mp3 file is in reality an aac 
file, i want info about it
	- if the only mp3 codec that was compiled into mplayer was a slow one, 
and mplayer knows that there are also faster/better-quality codecs for 
this file, maybe he should warn me about this issue
	

2. have mplayer to play an avi file with only one video track and only 
one audio track
	- i only want to watch the video. except the progress bar, no info 
necessary
	- if mplayer had to use an especially ineffective way to show me the 
file (slow code, suboptimal -vo etc..), and mplayer knows that perharps 
with a different setting i would get a better experience, it should 
inform me

3. have mplayer to play an mkv file, which contains multiple audio and 
subtitle tracks
	- i want mplayer to inform/warn me, that there are several audio  and 
subtitle tracks, and he picked this and that track, for this and that 
reason.


to sum this up:
when there's something, that could have been better for the user, 
mplayer should inform the user. otherwise it should be silent.

and as i wrote, this is for a 'minimum-info' setting.

developers could always add some "-v"s to the config file :)



gabor