On 4 February 2014 20:08, Darrell Anderson <darrella(a)hushmail.com> wrote:
7) 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