[MPlayer-G2-dev] G1 limitations

[D Richard Felker III]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 12:16:50PM -0600, Joey Parrish wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> My thoughts on G1 limitations... Well, the biggest ones to me are the
> lack of certain runtime features.  For example, switching
> audio/video/subtitle tracks on the fly, or seeking in DVD's by
> title/chapter. 

This shouldn't be too difficult, once the new _audio_ layer is done...
:))))))

Seriously, though, I think the new audio layer can wait for a little
bit. Part of the implementation philosophy for G2 is to replace
components one at a time until it's all new and all the broken G1
stuff is gone. Video is much more complicated and much more important;
the audio redesign should be fairly easy when it comes time.

> Another great thing would be DVD menu support.  I wrote
> a hack to switch DVD audio and subtitle at runtime, but was told that
> this will never be CVS because G1 can't reinit audio codecs.  Luckily,
> none of my DVDs have audio tracks in different codecs.  :)

I'm still not sure how to do this correctly, but IMO it needs to be
there. Actually I don't like DVD menus at all, but some people do, and
(here's the real reason ;) I'd also like MPlayer to be able to play
flash movies, which require similar user interaction.

Unfortunately this involves a few considerations in the vp layer,
mainly the ability to "freeze" the chain, notifying filters and the
calling app that no new images will be available until further user
interaction. Sort of a "temporary eof" condition.

> I also want to design a clean native windows GUI for MPlayer, but
> digging through G1's mplayer.c is very overwhelming.  G2 makes this
> easier as well.

Agree totally.

> I would like to change -vo gif89a into an encoder for MEncoder.  It
> makes much more sense there.  Why would I want to transcode from one
> format to another in MPlayer's vo?  Because I believe MEncoder is too
> much of a hassle to add a new container format.  Hopefully G2 will
> provide a solution to this too.

I agree here too. I always found the output-to-file vo's in mplayer
rather silly, but like you say, mencoder was too ugly and broken to
add new features...

> I don't think that any of my complaints on G1 are new or have not been
> discussed already about G2.  It's just basically a list of everything I
> ever tried to do in G1 but couldn't figure out, as well as  everything
> I did in G1 but was told "This will never be in CVS, because there's no 
> right way to do it," or "Wait for G2."  :)

OK, well thanks anyway for spelling it out clearly.

> Oh, and one more thing on my G2 wishlist.  Please provide complete
> documentation for every API very early on.  (As soon as they are mostly
> stable, perhaps.)  It will be extremely encouraging to potential
> developers.

Yes. Unfortunately there are lots of APIs for vp layer, but you can
get started with just the basics if you don't want to do fancy direct
rendering/slices setups. I'll write up a doc based on my emails to
this list and my own notes as soon as it's finished. I intend for it
to be _very_ detailed and complete.

Rich