Re: [trinity-devel] Default video player (Formerly UUGH! Desktop Icons open in DOLPHIN -- really?)
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
Darrell
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
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
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Calvin Morrison -
Darrell Anderson -
E. Liddell