[MPlayer-users] GUI fails

[W. Conrad]

Hi all,

May I offer my comment as a newbie who just went through his first 
installation:

> > > would it be so hard to make a very
> > > simple default skin which is placed upon the installation to the Skin
> > > directory and if the "-gui" option specified without any skins the
> > > mplayer would use the defaul one? and only those, who needs any other
> > > skins should find out where to place it, and how to call them?

That would have made things easier. No doubt. Not only would the GUI be 
available right way, also the correct skin subdirectory structure would be 
given. 

> > Nope, this is NOT the UNIX way! 

What's the UNIX way?

> and the WindowsMediaPlayer 

or some other _skinny_  skin

> is even smaller.. 31k, which would make the code increase by one and a half
> percent!)

1.5% on top of 2.4 Megs shouldn't make the bucket bust.

Maybe 2 tarballs, one without and one with an included standard skin would be 
a viable solution. 

On the other hand a README or INSTALL file in the installation directory that 
gives comments to typical problems at installation time would have been 
helpful. It was frustrating to dig through a huge documentation file packed 
with technical data looking for something as trivial as why the GUI won't 
work when all given recommendations were complied with or why this 
input.config file was missing. In fact, I never found the answers. I got it 
working by 'try and error'.

Psychological thing about it is when you install a new program, you are eager 
to see it running and you don't have the nerve read through huge files  
-activity increases - effectivness decreases  ( I guess if it wasn't for that 
the expression RTFM would not exist).

Oh well, a nice sunday to all of you

--enable-fun

Coney