On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 19:08:45 -0600 "Darrell Anderson" darrella@hushmail.com wrote:
- all distros support mplayer in one form or another
I suppose this is a packager problem, but the original idea of a default player is no external dependencies.
kaboodle needs at least 6-7 more codecs to stand a decent chance of being able to play a random chunk of video downloaded off the Web, which is what the average non-technical user wants a default player *for*, and the video scene is a constantly moving target. I think you've seriously underestimated the amount of work involved here--pretty much every Linux video player that's even minimally useful depends on ffmpeg, mplayer, xine, or gstreamer. Anything else isn't practical.
kmplayer can (or could, at one time) use xine or gstreamer backends in addition to mplayer. I don't think that depending on any one of those is excessive.
E. Liddell