bug handling policy / interaction with users / MPlayer

[Tim Jansen]

On Sunday 16 March 2003 02:01, Guillaume Laurent wrote:
> - he's not demanding anything, merely offerring suggestions, and good ones
> - he's not saying we should scrap it all
> - there is no "what already works", multimedia in KDE is way below the
> average quality level of the rest of the project.

Concerning MPlayer, there are two groups of people. Those who have used it, 
and those who have seen the code. I haven't seen a single person who has seen 
the code and still wanted to use it :) or even maintain a program based on 
it...

MPlayer often works very well for the two simple but most important cases, 
playing and recording, but it lacks any modularity. There is no plugin system 
for codecs (everything is compiled in and sometimes even hard-coded), you can 
not create pipelines, there is not even a API for using it. KMPlayer starts 
the 'mplayer' binary as a separate process, embeds its window and controls it 
by sending commands over a pipe.

And then there's also the legal problem. Many codecs, especially the whole 
MPEG family, are patent minefields. In a modular architecture a distribution 
can pick those codecs which can be legally distributed. But if everything is 
hard-coded you need to rewrite the engine for that...

bye..