[MPlayer-dev-eng] [FYI] new versions of libdvdread 0.9.3 and libdvdcss 1.2

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sun, Jun 02, 2002 at 07:36:10PM +0200, Attila Kinali wrote:
> On Thu, 30 May 2002 16:35:56 +0200
> pl <p_l at gmx.fr> wrote:
> 
> > The OGLE project has released a few days (weeks ?) ago new versions of
> > libdvdread 0.9.3 which requires libdvdcss 1.2 (from videolan).
> > 
> > URLs:
> >   http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/dist/libdvdread-0.9.3.tar.gz
> >   http://www.videolan.org/pub/videolan/libdvdcss/1.2.0/libdvdcss-1.2.0.tar.gz
> 
> Someone should check if the problems that brought us to mpdvdkit are still
> existent and if not, mpdvdkit should be removed. (I really dont like dublicated
> code, as we are now responsible for bugs in the dvd code)

IMHO having libdvdkit is a big plus. It saves users from having to
download tons of extra libs and make sure they dont get broken
versions, which in turn saves a lot of RTFM on -users. Also,
libdvdread has this broken behavior where it cracks all title keys at
startup rather than just the key for the title being played. This is
really bad because, from my experience, the title that's the main
movie is usually easy to crack (perhaps this has to do with it always
starting out all black? i dont know anything about how css works...)
but the later ones with all the trailers, "making of", etc. crap are
hard to crack and make startup time super-long. I patched this
behavior out in libmpdvdkit bit it's still there in libdvdread afaik.

Finally, one more thing, MPlayer seems to cache cracked keys in
~/.mplayer for later use, which I don't recall stock dvdread doing.
Maybe it can do that now with the latest version, though...

Anyway, even if the main developers do decide to get rid of dvdkit at
some point, I hope they package the dvd stuff with mplayer (like how
libfame is included now) and commit new versions in only when they're
known to be non-broken. The more external unusual dependencies a
program like mplayer has, the more users get turned off to using it.
("What?! You mean I have to download 5 more libraries to make it work?
Forget that I'll use [insert some other movie player here] instead!!")

Rich