On 4 February 2014 20:08, 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.
That's only half true, since our default packages depend on plenty of libraries and utilities
MPlayer is well supported but is not part of a stock installation on all distros. Other dependency presumptions exist in Trinity (for example, xine for amarok), yet nominating kmplayer as a default video player and moving into tdemultimedia means MPlayer needs to be installed.
Why the NIH syndrome? mplayer is good, requires little work, and is a clean dependency. Should we rewrite all the codec libraries for kaboodle? essentially all mplayer is seen doing is drawing the video, basically like a library dependency.
Audio players are not the same challenge. We have kaboodle, noatun, and juk, all installed by the base package tdemultimedia.
Fixing kaboodle gets us half way home. The other half is update kaboodle to support newer generations of avi/mpg and like or not, probably should support flv. For a default player that will suffice. People who want extensive video format coverage are going to install something else anyway.
I think that is going to be harder than you think, since there are even now more codecs emerging like WebM.
For Trinity users those additional apps will be kaffiene and kmplayer for video and amarok for audio. Not a problem for those types of users. We are discussing a basic default video player for the first-time out-of-the-box Trinity experience.
Which is why we should use something that users can play all videos with, something that works without additional program needing to be installed