[MPlayer-dev-eng] mms:// saying "Core dumped ;)"

[D Richard Felker III]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 09:40:05PM +0200, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> On Tuesday, 21 September 2004 at 00:42, rcooley wrote:
> > On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 15:58:44 -0400
> > The Wanderer <inverseparadox at comcast.net> wrote:
> > 
> > > considerable number of users for whom this is just plain not either
> > > clear or user-friendly? 
> > 
> > Some number of users just seem to be confused by EVERYTHING.  It doesn't
> > matter to them that the encoding process worked flawlessly, the fact
> > that "frameno.avi" or "codecs.conf" was "not found" will drive them
> > crazy...
> >
> > I don't think that this message is any more confusing than the rest. 
> > Changing this single message won't solve the problem... You'd need to
> > change mplayer so it doesn't output any non-fatal messages at all, by
> > default.  That's about the only thing that would make mplayer less
> > confusing for the mindless masses.
> 
> I agree.

Somewhat agree, but your output example is waaaay too minimal.

> This is a point worth considering. Remembering that a part of unix
> tradition is the "if everything went well, don't output anything"
> behaviour, MPlayer is way too verbose. I'd vote for leaving _only_ the
> progress/status bar and some essential information, i.e. (sample output):
> 
> $ mplayer sample.avi
> Video Output: X11/Xv
> Audio Output: OSS/ioctl audio output
> 
> Playing: /home/user/sample.avi
> Title: Sample movie
> Software: MEncoder-1.0pre5-3.3.3
> Author: Me
> 
> A:   2,8 V:   2,8 A-V: -0,001 ct:  0,001   70/ 70   5%  3%  0,8% 0 0 91%
> Done.
> 
> And that's it. What do you think?

At the very least we need:
AO & VO drivers.
Audio and video codec selected (and fourcc).
Audio params: samplerate, samplesize, channels.
Video params: dimensions, aspect, colorspace, fps.
Bitrates, if known.
Any audio or video filters in use.
Audio and subtitle languages, if known.
List of other optional audio/sub channels, w/languages.
File metainfo tags.

> > And that's just a start...  You also need to make "-idx" a default,
> 
> I believe MPlayer outputs something about -idx if you try to seek in a file
> without an index.

Exactly. Actually it should dynamically build _just the part of the
index needed_ when you attempt to seek, and also build the index as
the file is played... Then -idx would be irrelevant. And this won't
affect speed at all. It just requires some code. Care to send a patch?

> > add "-zoom" when a driver doesn't have hardware scaling,
> 
> Such driver (X11? DGA?) could output a small informational text, saying:
> "Hardware scaling unavailable, use -zoom for software scaling (SLOW)".

Agree. Drivers without hardware scaling should output a warning (and
optionally fail, to force vf_scale to get loaded) if the aspect is
wrong by more than a small threshold.

> > and many more "friendly" changes like that.
> 
> Not that many. And they would make the learning curve a bit less steep
> for some users.

Hmm, not sure if this is true or not...

> > And I don't even want to think about how many changes it will take to
> > make Mencoder idiot-friendly!
> 
> ACK, let's leave MEncoder alone.

Actually let's rm mencoder... :)

Rich