Re: Bug#144107: ITP: mplayer -- Movie player for Linux
On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 02:26:30PM -0500, Luis Bustamante wrote:
> MPlayer is a movie player for Linux.
http://www.MPlayerHQ.hu/DOCS/faq.html says:
Q: Are there rpm/deb/... packages of MPlayer?
A: You can make a .deb package for yourself, check the Debian
packaging section. It's strongly discouraged to use precompiled
packages of MPlayer, since it (currently) highly depends on
compile-time options and optimizations! Precompiled packages are
COMPLETELY unsupported by the MPlayer team!
Also http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/users_against_developers.html#binary:
* MPlayer's speed (MMX, SSE, fastmemcpy, etc) optimizations are
determined during compilation. Thus a compiled binary contains very
processor-specific code. An MPlayer binary compiled for K6 will die
on Pentiums and vice versa. This has to be workarounded by runtime
detection, which is not an easy thing to do becase it causes massive
speed decrease. If you don't believe (it was explained in details
10000 times on mplayer-users, search the archive), solve it and send
us a patch. Someone begun work on it, but disappeared since then.
* MPlayer's video/audio system is not plugin based. It is compiled
into the binary, thus making the binary depend on various libraries
(the GUI depends on GTK, DivX4 depends on libdivxdecore, SDL depends
on libSDL, every SDL release contains an unique bug that has to be
workarounded during compiletime, X11 output compiles differently for
X3 and X4, etc). You may say: yes, let's make 30 versions of
downloadable binaries! We won't. We will make these stuff pluggable
in the future.
Do you have a response to these? It sounds at the moment that the
mplayer developers would rather not see any binary packages; at least,
if they've changed their mind about this, they haven't updated their
documentation.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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