MPlayer Is Getting Closer To Version 1.0 Too

[Xipeos]

Well how many of the features do you actually use and how diligent your verifications are? Do you actually check the bits in an encoded file against the appropriate standard, do you perform measurements to see if a recent update did not degrade encoding quality, or do you just go like "it still plays my favorite movies, end of testing".

Most (all?) of mplayer's encoding and muxing is handled by external libraries (lame, x264, lavc, lavf, etc.). The in-tree ffmpeg is also external (as it's pulled from its own svn and is not modified). Therefore, an encoding problem wouldn't be mencoder's fault.

[deanjo]

In six years I have not seen even one mplayer that was buggy, it always plays whenever I throw at it and I don't remember it ever crashing.

Oh and, did I say that it's *the* fastest movie player out there? (Not that it matters with VDPAU, but when you're trying to play HD movie on a crappy netbook you see the difference.)

Sounds like you used it once ten years ago and now you're spreading your uninformed opinions all over the place.

As for the configuration file - does anyone even use it? I just created a wrapper script in /usr/local that calls mplayer <args I always> "$@"

Oh it is still fairly easy to crash, especially when you throw a corrupted file at it or a live stream. When I attempt to use it for watching the IPTV streams from my telco companies TV service for example it will hard freeze on any glitch in the stream. VLC and xine-lib and XBMC handle these with ease. Their dxr2 support hasn't worked in years, they had a channel mapping issue for years as well (although that finally was fixed a while back). V4L2 support is shaky at best as well and mencoder hasn't received much love in a long time.

[pingufunkybeat]

MPlayer is a ball of duct-tape spaghetti organised by the most rude and arrogant developer community in existence.

In the last 10 years I have encountered perhaps 2 or 3 DVDs or streams where some other player was better than MPlayer at actual playback.

I keep trying all these fancy players people keep talking about: Kaffeine, xine, VLC, XBMC, whatnot, and I always keep coming back to mplayer. Easy to control with the keyboard, and simply plays everything.

[deanjo]

I keep trying all these fancy players people keep talking about: Kaffeine, xine, VLC, XBMC, whatnot, and I always keep coming back to mplayer. Easy to control with the keyboard, and simply plays everything.

A lot of it depends on your setup I suppose. I use kaffiene for playing things like my IPTV streams to watch the hockey/football game or news in a window or on a second monitor while I'm at the computer doing stuff. For items like TV shows and movies however I'll go and watch them on the big screen and there XBMC rules.

[pingufunkybeat]

I actually like Kaffeine and VLC for DVD playback, as their dvd menus tend to be better.

It terms of actual playback quality, I have never found anything better than MPlayer. XBMC devours CPU cycles, most players have no easy way to boost brightness (my TV does not have a brightness control, believe it or not), they choke on many subtitle files, especially when non-English languages are involved, etc.

[deanjo]

It terms of actual playback quality, I have never found anything better than MPlayer. XBMC devours CPU cycles,

There is virtually no difference in CPU overhead during playback between XBMC and Mplayer (especially when hardware decoding is in use) and subtitles have never been an issue here with XBMC. Granted if I use sub titles they would be in English. XBMC also has a full set of picture controls as well for brightness and contrast.

[Joe Sixpack]

Lol, that is one area where they are in a class of their own without a doubt.

I take it you never tried to communicate with the old Gaim (now Pidgin) developers? LOL

[deanjo]

I take it you never tried to communicate with the old Gaim (now Pidgin) developers? LOL

Can't say that I have, I don't generally use (or have use of) IM. IRC is the closest I get to that.

[deanjo]

Too many years of hearing that fscking annoying "Oh Oh" when everybody used ICQ back in the day turned me off of IM forever.

[DeepDayze]

Too many years of hearing that fscking annoying "Oh Oh" when everybody used ICQ back in the day turned me off of IM forever.

Totally concur with that...pidgin and Amsn have both been my chat clients. Been using Mplayer in its various incarnations for years and it has been pretty stable for me as VLC sometimes crashes at most inopportune times