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MPlayer 0.90 released; MPlayer Maintainer Leaves

Posted by timothy on Tue Apr 08, 2003 05:10 AM
from the plays-what-you-throw-at-it dept.
Media Movies
Viqsi writes "459 days after the previous stable release, the MPlayer folks have finally released stable version 0.90. With this done, A'rpi (th head maintainer) is leaving the project, citing too-much-free-time-forever-lost issues, and the team is looking closely at revising the way the project is managed as a result. Here's hoping some improvements come out of this."
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MPlayer 0.90 released; MPlayer Maintainer Leaves 50 Comments More /

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  • Wha? (Score:4, Funny)

    by evilviper (135110) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:13AM (#5684963) Journal
    I'm in shock! No Mplayer-pre576 !

  • Congrats to the MPlayer team! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Longinus (601448) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:18AM (#5684976) Homepage
    .90 has been a long time in coming, but the wait was well worth it. I continue to be astounded by what mplayer and mencoder are capable of, and I shudder to think of what my Linux movie watching experience would be like without them. I hate to sound like a cheer leader, but I just don't think enough can be said about the fine work that A'rpi and Co. have produced over the years. In addition to our beloved kernel [kernel.org], it's always nice to have examples of open source software that so readily stomps into irrelevance its closed source competition. Good luck to A'rpi in whatever the future holds, and a thousand thanks for your contributions to the community.
    • it's always nice to have examples of open source software that so readily stomps into irrelevance its closed source competition

      By using closed source binary codecs stolen from proprietary closed source programs?

      • Re:Congrats to the MPlayer team! (Score:5, Informative)

        by Longinus (601448) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:32AM (#5685001) Homepage
        MPlayer ability to play hacked codecs is indeed a nice feature, but there's so much more the love about it, especially in the realms of performance (extremely low CPU usage), interface (sweet, sweet, command line, anti-aliased subs and osd), and flexablity (lots of other programs use mplayer, like MythTV and the mozilla-mplayer plugin that allows Linux users to watch movies in their browser). MPlayer manages to do a crap load of things without being bloated or slow.
        • Low CPU usage is an understatement. I can play fabulous looking video in almost any format with no more than around 2% CPU usage on my Athlon 1400. It's very well designed. Just give it a good video card with appropriate XV support, and it flies. And it's got to be the most stable player out there.

          A'rpi, thanks for all of the work that you've done. I'm sorry that you've missed out on a lot of free time, but your work is deeply appreciated by many. You've helped take the frustration out of Linux video
      • Yes. And we love it!

        Seriously, ofcourse it had been better to do it in some other way, but what do you propose?

      • Re:Congrats to the MPlayer team! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by vandan (151516) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:41AM (#5685027) Homepage
        By using closed source binary codecs stolen from proprietary closed source programs?

        It depends on what you're trying to achieve. If your first priority is to make a movie player / encoder package for Linux that rocks, then you may have to make compromises with your purest vision of open source technology, at least for a period.

        Of course each person has the option of not downloading and using the windows binaries, but I will guarantee that for those who use mplayer as their main video player, when they have the choice of using mplayer's .dll loading capabilities or switching to another video player that has a native linux decoder, they will stick with mplayer. It's nice to have ideals, but when you're watching a movie, you care more about how the movie looks / sounds than whether you have win32 dll loaded.

        • Re:Congrats to the MPlayer team! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by YrWrstNtmr (564987) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @08:15AM (#5685494)
          It's nice to have ideals, but when you're watching a movie, you care more about how the movie looks / sounds than whether you have win32 dll loaded.

          So what you're saying is, that it's ok to cuddle up to software from the EvilOne(tm) as long as naked chicks look ok on your screen, ideals be damned.

        • Re:Congrats to the MPlayer team! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Kourino (206616) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @09:19AM (#5685819) Homepage

          Of course each person has the option of not downloading and using the windows binaries, but I will guarantee that for those who use mplayer as their main video player, when they have the choice of using mplayer's .dll loading capabilities or switching to another video player that has a native linux decoder, they will stick with mplayer.

          Wrong. Most of my computers can't run Windows binaries. (In fact, the computer I've come to use the most runs a PowerPC 750.) After all, not all the world's an x86. I'll take my native decoder, thanks. That way I can actually watch stuff.

      • Re:Congrats to the MPlayer team! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Kourino (206616) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @07:52AM (#5685393) Homepage
        ... that only work on one platform? It still annoys me greatly that mplayer runs extremely well on my Pentium 3, but, depending on the task, absolutely crawls on comparable hardware from other architectures, or just plain doesn't support stuff at all.

        mplayer? Plays everything? You obviously don't use powerpc-*-linux or alpha-*-linux :3

        • Re:yes, exactly because of that (Score:4, Insightful)

          by October_30th (531777) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:37AM (#5685013) Homepage Journal
          I don't give a shit. I rather like Linus' using-the-right-tool-for-the-job attitude. If there is an open source alternative to closed software, that's fine and dandy. If there is no feasible open source alternative, using proprietary software is just fine.

          I merely pointed out the hypocricy of calling MPlayer an open source revolution that stomps closed source into oblivion when its core performance is enabled by closed source (unlicensed) binaries?

          • Re:yes, exactly because of that (Score:4, Informative)

            by Longinus (601448) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:42AM (#5685032) Homepage
            "I merely pointed out the hypocricy of calling MPlayer an open source revolution that stomps closed source into oblivion when its core performance is enabled by closed source (unlicensed) binaries?" What bullshit. MPlayer's "core performance" remains the same whether or not it was compiled with support for Win32 codecs. I do use the right tool for the right job, and that tool is MPlayer. The ability to play Win32 codecs is merely a bonus to me, and help in a pinch whenever I have the misfortune of needing to watch a Real video clip. 99% of my videos are encoded in open codecs like XviD anyway. The point is that MPlayer rocks regardless of what codec its playing, and to say that its only value is the ability to play win32 codecs is to be completely ignorant to what an amazing piece of technology it is in it's own right.

  • THANKS ARPI! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:19AM (#5684977)
    A GREAT BIG THANK YOU TO YOU AND THE REST OF THE MPLAYER TEAM!!!

    You saved our day when there was no decent video player for Linux some two years ago. You brought us the Microsoft ASF fileformat support and Sorenson Quicktime.

    I will never forget.. MPlayer played a vital role in Linux's success. The best videoplayer on this planet! So fast it's hard to believe!

    • Re:THANKS ARPI! (Score:5, Informative)

      by den_erpel (140080) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:29AM (#5684997) Homepage Journal
      Next to this obvious cheering, it is a fact that mplayer is the most versatile player around that I can think of. I've seen lots of cases that mplayer is capable of player files with odd framerates (audio and video, mainly produced by a bad configured digital camera) while other (includeing M$ mplayer) players choked on it.

      Since the license change, I've seen that (that allowed binary packaging) it is gradualy pushing other players to the background, exaclty due to it's versatility (aviplayer, xine, vlc, ...)

      The documentation seems to be somewhat lacking and for some things I (still) use IMHO better tools:

      video recording: nvrec, AFAIK mplayer does not support V4L2
      encoding: transcode, mainly because transcode seems to have a much better doc and logical buildup of the options to transcode and large modularity (for filters). I use mencoder sometimes when transcode has problems with particular file (or used to)

      One thing which no player seems to pull of correctly, is to play files with awfully synced audio, video...

  • MPlayer rules... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:20AM (#5684980)
    ...they should turn the entire core into a lib and leave the whole GUI and frontend stuff to ppl who have time to waste with GUI and frontend development.

    MPlayer is so cool.. they dont need to write their own GUI...

  • well (Score:4, Informative)

    by daserver (524964) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:21AM (#5684983) Homepage
    Well Arpi is still there on the mailinglist doing stuff, he's just not the maintainer any longer.

  • Sound so familar (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jsse (254124) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:26AM (#5684988) Homepage Journal
    while we spend our expensive time by rev. engineering codecs, optimizing code, writing demuxers, they improve the gui. then they 'steal' the others and win.

    wait a minute, why this sound so familiar?.....

    Oh! Micro*shot*

  • Embedded Mplayer (Score:5, Informative)

    by mrsev (664367) <mrsev@sp y m a c .com> on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:32AM (#5685000)
    Not many know this but texstar has a awesome package for embedding Mplayer into Konqueror. This is just awesome.

    Big thanks to the developers., for this one.

  • will it lose the race against xine? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Pivot (4465) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:35AM (#5685010)
    From his second posting;
    > IMHO mplayer is good enough now that it won't lost in /dev/null if i leave.

    > > Probably not, but will it lose the race against xine?

    imho we lose it already. see xine, its popularity started to grow since a month and keeps growing. while we spend our expensive time by rev. engineering codecs, optimizing code, writing demuxers, they improve the gui. then they 'steal' the others and win. we have no chance against xine... Ah, stability. Yes, in old days mplayer was rock solid while xine crashed at every second click. It has been changed: mplayer is now everything but stable (thanks to that many hacks and 10l bugs), while xine improved stability a lot...

  • Hope this project doesn't fall by the way side (Score:3, Funny)

    by sneakybilly (537969) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:40AM (#5685022)
    This is by far the best Linux Media Player out. Plays all my pr0n :)

  • Idea for a new media player (Score:4, Insightful)

    by evilviper (135110) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @05:42AM (#5685029) Journal
    Strangely enough, each thread I comment on, seems to lead into a discussion relevant to a story not-yet-posted.

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=59962&thresh ol d=3&commentsort=0&tid=188&mode=nested&cid=5684 779

    Basically, perhaps the best idea for a media player, is to work-out a robust, system-independant, plugin mechanism. That way, everything else (audio/video output, interface, etc) can be done seperately from the decoding/encoding. A media player is much more useful if you don't have to recompile it to add support for one more format. Windows Media Player, Real Player, and Quicktime all have the ability to download plugins, the only problem is that they are very-much system specific. If there was a system-independent plugin mechanism, there wouldn't be so much redundant work, with everyone doing the same things from scratch, for each player, and on each platform.

    A media player on Linux, Windows, Mac, or even a hardware device, could all use the same plugin, which you can store along with your media file if you like.

    The only thing that would have to be done for each platform, is to build a user interface, and write the native input/output calls. Sure, that's not so simple, but so much work is going into the codecs, that such a system would greatly simplify things. Just think, a Windows user could write a plugin for his video player, which you could then just copy over to your plugin folder, and play the same format.

    One stiplation, it is very unlikely embedded developers will adopt a piece of software if it is under a license more restrictive than the BSD, so a reference implimentation would have to be BSD licensed. (The folks at Xiph.org understood that)
    • The GStreamer [gstreamer.net] project aimed to do this and xine already has support for demuxer, codec, output, etc plugins (indeed all the DVD features used by xine used to exist as a totally separate project at dvd.sf.net).
    • Basically, perhaps the best idea for a media player, is to work-out a robust, system-independant, plugin mechanism. That way, everything else (audio/video output, interface, etc) can be done seperately from the decoding/encoding. A media player is much more useful if you don't have to recompile it to add support for one more format. Windows Media Player, Real Player, and Quicktime all have the ability to download plugins, the only problem is that they are very-much system specific. If there was a system-ind

  • Maybe we'll finally get some threading (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sanemind (155251) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @06:00AM (#5685074) Homepage
    Of course, I don't mean to complain, for goodness sakes. A'rpi has done an amazing job. I recently introduced a friend of mine to linux, and he was awe-struck by the huge functionality and flexibility of mplayer. I will always be greatfull for the development that has gone into this wonderful program that I use every day.

    Mplayer only just recently got inverse-telecine, which is a Good Thing for those of us who like to archive a lot of shows.... I used to have to use virtaldub under wine if I wanted to get IT done right [for truly treasured movies... the rest I just deinterlaced and accepted the quality loss].

    The only remaining quibble I have with mplayer, actually most specifically with mencoder, is the lack of any threaded/forked/etc rendering pipeline. I am somewhat in the minority in having a SMP system, but there are a good deal of us out there. It causes me such pain to not have quite enough cpu to do certain realtime effects while encoding, to fall behind, while I see CPU0 pegged to 100%, and CPU1 just sitting there idle.

    There was a big occasion for disagreement a while back, when someone tried to get some threading into mplayer, even had working patches. A'rpi refused. He had somewhat of a point; the context switching overhead actually wastes cycles on a single processor. [As well as flushing the cache at inoportune times]. Threading on a uniprocessor system would only really help with I/O latencies, but mplayer has great cacheing, and manages well, even with just a single context.

    I'm torn between being hopefull that maybe there will be more openess to future improvements such as SMP support, but I'm also sad to see such a wonderfull developer throw in the towel. MPlayer probably wouldn't have happened without him.

  • A'rpi ? (Score:3, Funny)

    by dnaumov (453672) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @06:04AM (#5685084)
    "How do I..." "RTFM IDIOT!!!11"

    You mean THAT A'rpi ?

    • Re:A'rpi ? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 08 2003, @07:36AM (#5685316)
      "How do I..." "RTFM IDIOT!!!11"

      You mean THAT A'rpi ?

      I think that attitude is something that easily happens if you invest too much time and devotion into a project, especially if that project is really rather complex and draws the attention of a lot of newbies to Linux who want to watch vidz. If you're trying to focus on the development with hundreds of dependencies to keep in mind and every day you get the same "How do I.." FAQs on the mailing list, I guess you tend to go down the "It's in the docs, check the README file", "Please read the docs, it's all in there", "PLEASE read the docs, we didn't write them for fun" "READ THE GODDAM FUCKING DOCS!!" route rather quickly.

      Maybe projects like this should have separate PR people who are not as directly involved with development but know enough about the project to hand out clues to newbies, keeping the coders free to focus on deeper things.

  • developers attitude... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by erroneus (253617) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @06:10AM (#5685090) Homepage
    ...I had joined the mailing list and the beginning of every message is "RTFM." It's quite insulting they'd think this incomplete project has complete documentation and answers every question.

    I had mentioned, as a user, things that should be addressed and they kept saying things like "use the CLI" for that. Utterly ridiculous.

    I am hopeful that someone will step up and guide development. Actually, I'd do it myself if I thought people would listen to me. I am not a developer and I think that'd be reason enough to disqualify me.

    I hope these things improve... it's a good project.
    • they kept saying things like "use the CLI" for that. Utterly ridiculous.

      Hardly. It's common for a project with both a CLI and a GUI to have more functionality available via the CLI - it's just so much easier to add an extra option to the command line than to screw around with whatever graphical toolkit is being used for the GUI.

    • Oh come on... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Replicant7 (530766) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @08:58AM (#5685703)
      This has changed dramatically. No, seriously you are talking about the past. Which parts of the documentation do you find lacking? I'm the documentation maintainer and I will try to address the points you may make...
  • It would have been a far more useful release had it been made 2 months ago, as we've had the top linux distros all release new versions in the last month or so.

    Easy to say that in hindsight, sure, but it may mean that people who were using mplayer will switch to Xine in the latest distro releases.

    I've switched to Xine with the latest release of Mandrake I'm testing, except for DVD movies, which I use mplayer for, starting it with a shell script - mplayer is just so damn fine at playing DVD's (with a bit of timing tweaking)

  • Thank You from OS X users (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Loco3KGT (141999) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @08:05AM (#5685439)
    Because Quicktime won't play 1/2 the stuff you do. And Windows Media Player for Mac is just as bad. I use mplayer for *everything* thanks to you (and fink).

  • So much hostility... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by entrigant (233266) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @08:19AM (#5685514)
    Most everyone here should know that a free project with no incoming profit stream usually comes with that big "no warranty expressed or implied" disclaimer, and no technical support. This, however, is only a disclaimer, and a lot of project development teams are very helpful and responsive to users questions. This is a good thing that is happens so much, but as usual there is a dark side. Users become 4 year old spoiled brats.

    I've had no personal experience with this guy before, as I haven't run into a problem in mplayer I couldn't fix myself from RTFM/S (Reading the ... Manual/Source), but from what I hear he has no desire to play tech support guy for the hundreds of users of mplayer. What should we think of this? I think that I don't blame him, I'd be telling people to F Off too, I don't have time for that shit. Is free not enough for you people here? I'm sick of seeing crap like "I would use MPlayer, but the author told me to RTFM!"

    Boo Fucking Hoo
    • Hmm. What you say is true. There has to be a line drawn somewhere, beyond which you give up on the user being unable to RTFM. However in the case of mplayer, the developer is a spoiled four year old brat as well. Here's a direct quote:

      "Unfortunately MPlayer is out of our control. It's used by lamers, Linux users who can't even use Windows, and never tried to compile a kernel."

      Call that tech support? 'If you can't compile a kernel, you're not WORTHY of our player.'

      I've not had any problems with mplayer--i

  • Xine vs Mplayer (Score:4, Insightful)

    by realnowhereman (263389) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (snikrapydna)> on Tuesday April 08 2003, @09:11AM (#5685782)
    Not wanting to be objectionable ... but ... i've actually found mplayer to be slower than xine. I've got both on my 500MHZ K6-2 laptop and I can (just about) watch a DVD with xine. With Mplayer the CPU pegs and i get frame drops. To be fair I didn't try very hard to make mplayer work; but then again neither did I try very hard to make xine work. Anyone got any idea why this would be? I assume that I am incorrect in my assesment that xine is faster as the oft reported benefit of mplayer is its incredible speed...

    Xine recently seems to have taken a few leaps and bounds as well. The DVD nav stuff is working very nicely. There are a lot less crashes, the GUI is a lot more stable.

    I doubt whether competition is a bad thing anyway. At all other times in the OSS world competition has been beneficial, not least because they can steal each others code.

    • Re:Attitude (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SilverSun (114725) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @06:23AM (#5685114) Homepage
      And I really hope they loose theit fear of Version number 1.0. I am pretty amnazed that Arpi leaves without having a half decent 1.0 out. gui is still disabled by default. Why? Largefiles: disabled. Why? The output mplayer sends to stdout is still a incredible mess. I wonder why he leaves the project without cleaning up these few last bits. In principle MPlayer is the most usable, stable, and featurefull media player for linux. Only thing is, it's a mess.

      I hope the first thing they do is clean up the code. MPlayer lost _many_ developers to xine lately. xine has not caught up to MPlayer in speed and number of supported formats. Also it seems to be still less stable and more vulnerable to broken video files, but the code base is MUCH more clean (xine sources can actually be called beautifull) Maybe this disruption of MPlayer development can also be seen as a chance for a more unified default mediaplayer for linux, i.e. xine.

      The one thin xine is lacking is an encoder a la mencoder. But there is some development with enix. The design looks as clean and easy as xine and I am pretty confident that enix can catch up to mencoder in a short time provided that some more developers are interested.

      Cheers

      • The output mplayer sends to stdout is still a incredible mess.

        If you don't want to see that, use the -quiet or -really-quiet options. Most of that information is important for knowing how far into the video you are, or what went wrong. Yeah, a GUI will show that information, but with the current state, I don't think many use the GUI anyway. It doesn't seem to work on my system at all--the GUI is just shows a bunch of fuzz.

        I hope the first thing they do is clean up the code. MPlayer lost _many_ developer

    • Re:Gstreamer (and xine?) (Score:5, Insightful)

      by groomed (202061) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @07:27AM (#5685280)
      I think the last thing the world needs is another media framework. Not that it's a bad idea per se, or that gstreamer is bad. But there are too many perfectly good frameworks already. And they all have one thing in common: while they promise ultimate flexibility and all kinds of ubercool features, in practice, only a few combinations of plugins work really well. And even those would have worked better if they had simply been integrated into a single app.

      What we need is code that does heavy lifting. Code that can read and write all sorts of file formats and that can do so at blistering speeds. But that requires mindnumbing attention to detail and painstaking testing on a wide range of different files and machines. So that most people prefer to indulge in the fantasy that all of this difficult work will just somehow evaporate, just as long as there is a good framework: "it's the bureaucracy, stupid". Of course, that rarely, if ever, pans out. At best, the grandiose Framework is reduced an API for manipulating media clips (QuickTime). At worst, it forever remains a flaky research project to satisfy the will-to-power of a few geeks and true believers (http://www.sourceforge.net).

      Now that last part was a bit flamebaity. But what I'm trying to say is that instead of spending time on developing a "media framework" that can do "every conceivable thing", is almost always better to spend your time considering which of those "conceivable things" actually makes sense: and implementing that.

    • Oh Please! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Fefe (6964) on Tuesday April 08 2003, @09:10AM (#5685778) Homepage
      Sheesh, people like you make Linux look more and more like Windows.

      "No, we don't need functionality, we need a framework!" (add "distributed", "real-time", "platform-independent" or "byte-code" to enhance the buzziness)

      "No, we don't need functionality, we need a pretty GUI!"

      "No, we don't need functionality, we need XML support!"

      I was able to build an embedded video playing machine using mplayer and Linux on a VIA C3 box in just 8 Megs of boot image size! Forget all that framework and XML and X and GUI and Gtk bullshit. You can stick your GNOME and ORBit where the sun don't shine. I just want to view movies on my machine, without your framework mania forcing me to install 3.1415e926 dependency packages first.

      That is the reason why mplayer rules by such a margin: it doesn't need fifty trillion packages which add no real value to the application itself.
    • You don't need to add any special compile-time flags for Quicktime anymore. That changed about 3 or 4 releases ago. ./configure --enable-gui --prefix=/*temp dir*/usr/

      should suffice for a Slackware 9 system (It's what I use). Be sure to put your codecs in /usr/lib/win32 before compiling, and then copy them to your tarball directory before running "makepkg". Be sure to keep the same directory structure. Run "makepkg" in that temp directory.

        • Re:okok... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Bandman (86149)
          MPlayer doesn't really decode the media streams. It uses dll files for other operating systems which decode them. Basicly, in order to legally decode Sorenson, for example, you have to have Quicktime on a windows partition. To decode some Mpeg4 stuff, it uses native Windows DLLs, which to legally use, you must have Windows. At least this is the way I understand it. Because of this, MPlayer treads a fine line between legal and illegal. I believe it is GPL, or some other other Open Source license. The program

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