code complexity (was: Re: [MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] new codec AIFF PCM Audio support)

[Shachar Raindel]

On Sun, 1 Aug 2004 23:34:58 +0900, Attila Kinali <attila at kinali.ch> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 12:38:07PM +0000, Roberto Togni wrote:
> 
> > Don't feel discouraged by the negative comments, MPlayer is a very
> > complex software and it takes some time to get used to it's design
> > details.
> 
> Yeah, a lot of time. I dont know when i actualy started to work on the
> code of mplayer, but i'm still not used to it's design.
> I have a few ideas how to improve that situation, but i need some time
> to test it (not to mention the necessary discussion here) and there are
> more important matters at hand (like the mga_vid patch)
> 

Just a small idea for the design (if there is any...) - a 3282 lines
function (main() in mplayer.c) should be split into more humanly
understandable pieces....
Also writing some document, that explains how usual video playback,
with audio and sub-titles is performed will help grately for people
who want to join the development. DOCS/tech/general.txt is nice, but
it will be much better to have a bit more in depth description of this
stuff, especially of the af stuff, which is completly undocumented
(and why do we need both ao_plugin with pl_* and af_* ? Can someone
please please please clean it up? ) Also, it will be nice to give
dates to the documets already there (simply adding $id$ should be
enough, as the CVS will put it in by itself - see
https://www.cvshome.org/docs/manual/cvs-1.11.17/cvs_12.html#SEC97 ).

   Cheers,
   Shachar