MPlayer 0.90 released; MPlayer Maintainer Leaves

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."

Congrats to the MPlayer team!

[Longinus]

.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.

Sound so familar

[jsse]

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*

Windows port?

[Majin Bubu]

How about a Windows port of MPlayer? I know there are a lot of great players for Win, but I'd love to get rid of the *many* programs I need to play the various formats under Windows.
Uh, please, don't suggest using Linux, I already do, I am a dual-booter, I just want something like MPlayer under Win as well.

Re:Congrats to the MPlayer team!

[Kynde]

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.

Not trying to bash mplayer or anything, I used for quite some time, but how about Xine [sf.net] ? I switched over a few months back and I've been more than happy with that.

I think the approach in Xine is more *nixy like with the marvellous lib and multiple UIs. But that's just my 2 cents...

Gstreamer (and xine?)

[KeyserDK]

I think a projects like gstreamer has far more future than mplayer. It's true that mplayer has far more codec support, but what is really needed is a multimedia architecture, such as gstreamer.

This is one important step getting linux closer to the desktop.

Maybe we'll finally get some threading

[sanemind]

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.

Re:Attitude

[SilverSun]

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 timing of the release could have been better..

[bushboy]

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)

Re:Congrats to the MPlayer team!

[13Echo]

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. And it's nice that I have a means of listening to those NPR audio streams too. I wish you the best of luck.

Re:Idea for a new media player

[groomed]

A media player is much more useful if you don't have to recompile it to add support for one more format.

Because new formats hit the market... Um... Maybe once a year?

If there was a system-independent plugin mechanism

There would also be no system dependant optimizations.

there wouldn't be so much redundant work, with everyone doing the same things from scratch, for each player, and on each platform.

The work is in figuring out how a file format works and how to decode it at fast as possible with the highest possible quality. Most of the rest is just preference, and you don't even want to generalize that.

Developers are very keen on the cost of even the slightest code duplication, but they rarely consider the cost to the user of having to hunt for and install the latest libraries, the small bugs that are caused by slightly different versions of libraries, and the tripling or even quadrupling of development time that it takes to produce solid resuable code.

Re:Congrats to the MPlayer team!

[Kourino]

... 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

okok...

[Lispy]

looks like i was waay too nervous while trying to make a firstpost. Of course youre right, Mplayer rocks, and it resides on my Mediahub at home. Maybe someone could explain to me why it isnt included in most distributions yet? I once read about licensing issues but still dont fully understand.

cu,
Lispy

Re:will it lose the race against xine?

[Apreche]

The trueness. I use Xine because it has an easy GUI, it plays all types of files well without me having to do anything special. It comes with my distro. Oh yeah, it has a GUI.

This is a public service announement. There are two types of open source projects out there. The first kind is the kind where someone will write software for themselves and share the source to be nice and help others. The other kind is where someone writes software they want lots of other people to use and they develop it using the open source model.

If you are making the second kind of software you need to make a gui. You need to make an easy installer. You need to think about all the things a closed source company thinks about. The way I see it there are very few of the second type that have succeeded. gaim, Mozilla, CDex, DC++. That's about it. Every other piece of OSS has failed miserably in some way.

mplayer is one of those that has failed. I know how amazing it plays video. But the effort of making it work is greater than the benefit of using it. It should come in a single executable file that installs it. It should then have a GUI that works no matter what and never crashes. And it should play everything out of the box. It doesn't, so it is the loser.

Thank You from OS X users

[Loco3KGT]

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).

EDL System

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the more overlooked features of MPlayer is the EDL (edit decision list) system. This allows for real-time editing of video streams during playback. This kind of functionality pushes MPlayer/mencoder one step closer to suitability as a backend to a non-linear digital video editing system.

You can use EDL for all kinds of things. One that comes to mind it to dynamically skip over commercials or advertisements in video streams. Another may be to skip over or mute content that you may find inappropriate or offensive; this occurs during playback, or the original video stream is left untouched. This works with any kind of media that MPlayer is capable of decoding, which makes it a very useful feature for many potential uses.

Thanks Mplayer Crew

[ThoreauHD]

I wanted to THANK YOU, and A'rpi of course, for what you've done. I would also like to thank the PLF at http://plf.zarb.org for making it useable on non-gcc 2.95 machines and for making the plugins so accessible.

Mplayer is a kickass player compared to any OS/media player. Using linux would suck to no end without you.

Re:okok...

[Bandman]

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 would be distributable, but the files on which it mainly depends (not all, there are some public domain decoders included i believe) would not be. That is probably why alot of distros don't include it.

Re:So much hostility...

[Trejus]

Made up my mind about what? All i'm trying to say is that often times people get confused and it's not the best course of action to blindly respond to such queries with "RTFM," or a similarly rude statement. While there is some onus on the users to execute their part of the bargain, idealy, some effort should be made to help the ones who have acted responsibly, but still need help. If you don't want to take the time to figure out who is who, then your user base is better off if you don't bother replying at all. Let someone else do it. I'm having trouble seeing exactly what part of that you are objecting to.....

elisist - someone who believes in rule by an elite group ant: egalitarian (from Wordnet )

This is exactly what I'm talking about. The whole RTFM business is "once you know what you are talking about, you are allowed into our society." One of the earlier posters even mentioned how A'rpi complained because his project was in the control of the linux newbie crowd. How is that not elitism?

And according to American Heritage Dictionary, through Dictionary.com [reference.com] my use of the word "ass" to describe a stupidly self important person is not an expletive.

On the subject of GUI

[HuguesT]

Hi,

You write:

> The other kind is where someone writes software
> they want lots of other people to use and they
> develop it using the open source model.
> If you are making the second kind of software
> you need to make a gui.

Indeed I'm often reminded of the stunning GUIs associated with gcc, samba, apache and the Linux kernel.

Re:Read between the lines

[Anonymous Coward]

I have read all the posts on debian-devel and debian-legal. Debian seemed to be hostile and not mplayer.
The mplayer team just couldn't understand, why debian has rejected including mplayer in the distrib. Debian told something about legal reasons, but they didnt answer the arguments of the mplayer team.
I have read every available comment about Redhats gcc 2.96. Xine had to hack, as far as I know, the code to be compatible with that unofficial version of gcc. The mplayer team didn't do that. To include a compiler, that nobody else uses, in a distrib is like a well known companies strategy.
The mplayer team could not understand why some distribs (e.g. Suse) include a crippled down version in their distrib. They didn't get an answer, AFAIK.
Tons of users came to the mailing list with problems allready solved. The distribs version of mplayer was either crippled down, or had this madman "property" compiler.
As I know there is only one distrib, which contains mplayer in whole. UHU