[MPlayer-dev-eng] PATCH to support theora-exp in mplayer

[Timothy B. Terriberry]

Rich Felker wrote:
> My philosophy is that, when hacks are required to support a bad format
> (xiph headers), they should be isolated as close to the "problem" as
> possible, so that they don't affect other parts of the program.

No, because that's stupid. You have stated that one of your intended
goals is to use this extradata format to support embedding Theora in
Matroska or AVI or whatever else with no special handling. Shoving the
first I-frame into it would directly prohibit that, since it would
require special handling in all of those demuxers, achieving the exact
opposite of what you'd intended. I'm sure there are ways to work around
that mess, but when compared to a generic 7 line function (which, if you
drop the bounds checks---arguably a good idea since crashing when a
function is misused is often better than failing silently because no one
bothered to check the return code---is actually just a single
subtraction), I can't possibly see why you would think they would be
easier to maintain.