[MPlayer-dev-eng] Native codec removal

[Jonas Jensen]

On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 00:10, Roberto Togni wrote:
> Since mid November MPlayer is using 8BPS, MS rle, MS Video1, Qt RPZA  
> and QT SMC decoders from libavcodec.
> 
> Noone complained or reported any bug, even now that pre3 is out.
> 
> So, i'll remove our native decoders in a few days.
> 
> If you have any reason to keep them for more time, please let me know.

IMHO it's a good thing to have more than one codec for a given format.
The codecs may perform identically on most files, but some day some user
will try to play a damaged/out-of-spec/weird file, and the "good" codec
may fail to play it while the "bad" one, by luck, can do it. That leads
to improvements in the robustness of the good codec.

Another case is when a change is made to the good codec and nobody
notices that it breaks playback of 5% of all movies. If there isn't a
bad codec to test against, users will just think that their file is
broken and the good codec might never get fixed.

If the only problem with the native codecs is that they take up space, I
vote for keeping them.

-- 
Jonas Jensen <jbj at knef.dk>