mplayer from SVN

[Michal Varga]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 7:05 PM, Frank Staals <frank at fstaals.net> wrote:
> On 12/29/09 14:31, Lars Engels wrote:
>>
>> Quoting Frank Staals <frank at fstaals.net>:
>>
>>> I know it is not as nice as simply having a port. But if you realy need
>>> the svn-releases for some feature XYZ it may be a (temporary) solution.
>>
>>
>> Are there any killer features missing in our old version from ports?
>
> I don't really know. The reason that I used svn snapshots in the past was
> that my machine in combination with the mplayer port was unable to decode
> relatively high res h264 video while with the svn version there were some
> improvements which did make it possible. But that is a long time ago.
>
Related to that, VDPAU ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU ) is
definitely "the killer feature", though I'm not sure how well (and if)
it works on FreeBSD. For what I know, it works miracles on Linux
(well, at least Linux people say that). Quick google turned out this,
so I guess it's a start:
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=4756

For anything else "killer-grade", I'm not really sure, but since the
dawn of time, mplayer code base has always been a bit flaky (well, "a
bit" itself is a bit too generous here). I guess all of us keep at
least one other "backup" movie player (Gnome's Totem, XINE before
that, etc.) for files that make mplayer die horribly in a ball of fire
(recent youtube formats, I'm looking at you!) and vice versa - so one
can reasonably assume that sticking to a 3-year old code base is not
the very best we could do here and in the long term, unmanageable. It
will only get worse.. 4 years? 5 years? Eventually other apps that use
mplayer as their backend will start to fail, dtto various mencoder
frontends (I'd say 'video editing software', if we only had any), and
we will get stuck with gstreamer-powered crap (ok, not exactly bad,
but even now in 2009, it's light years far from anything that 3-year
old mplayer can do, and, you know, even a bad timed sneeze or an
unfavorable lunar phase can make Totem crash).

Anyway, my point was - if there is anyone planning on bringing mplayer
up to date - either the main port, or as a set of new -devel ports,
please, please, please, do it soon. Even from strictly political view
- having something as hight profile as "THE" movie player on *nix
built from a 3 year old code base just looks bad and only adds fuel to
various "Linux vs. BSD" piss contests. The whole situation needs to be
dealt with*.

m.

(* Sooner, or later.)