FAQ, Re: new mplayer
hi everybody
I just now notice the debate on mplayer going on;
so here are a few answers
[many people]
> MPlayer dev team and Debian do not work together
this is not the case.
I have been working with Diego Biurrun (of the mplayer team)
and Joerg Jaspert (of ftp-master team)
many changes that Joerg asked have been applied directly
by Diego into SVN
this is why this package is a SVN snapshot
> Please tell me what's wrong with current package and what can we
> do to make it better and stop saying me it's license issue.
in July, Joerg reviewed the mplayer package in NEW and listed
many issues; most of them regards the licenses
Since MPlayer incorporates code from many sources, it needs to
properly document this fact ; this was done,
by adding all necessary licenses and copyrights statements
both in upstream code (thanks to Diego) and in
debian/copyright file . Moreover now Mplayer
documents the differences between its shipped version
of libraries such as FFMPEG, and the upstream version ;
this is again done to comply with GPL .
[Andrew Donnellan ]
> Since when was MPlayer acceptable in the Debian archive?
mplayer is in the NEW queue (sorry for the misunderstanding)
[Yavor Doganov]
> I was wondering, what's so important about mplayer?
it works quite well for me ; e.g. , I have a digital camera
that can record movies (MPEG4 in MOV) , last time I tried
(~1 month ago) totem and xine reproduced my movies with skippy audio ;
moreover , when I tried ~1 year ago, mplayer was capable
of playing DVDs on my Pentium 450, while some other players
were skipping frames .
Of course, other people may prefer other players... that is fine for
me; one nice point of Debian is that it offers all choices,
Gnome vs KDE, Emacs vs Vi vs ... , OpenOffice vs AbiWord ;
so it is just a big shame that mplayer is still missing
[fEnIo]
> Mplayer comes with his friend mencoder.
Not in Debian, and it probably never will.
At the request of Joerg from ftp-master team, I even deleted mencoder.c
from the tarball, to make it clear that we do not want to incur in any
patent problem.
> Yes, I know there won't be w32codecs package in Debian, but even
> mplayer would be great addition.
there is a script for downloading those
a.
ps: feel free to ask more questions; if you want a quick answer, CC me,
I do not read d-devel usually
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