[MPlayer-users] Why not make an installer?

[Martin]

MPlayer is certainly an impressive piece of software but the difficulties of 
installing it along with all the different codecs, fonts, GUIs etc. are IMO 
keeping potential users away from it and hinder moving to Linux entirely. 
Since making a RPM-type installable binary package for all distros is not 
possible, why not make an installer? 

An installer like Loki Games' (also used by Unreal Tournament 2003 and some 
other games) could solve this problem nicely. It could have checkboxes for 
installing different codecs and display the necessary licenses for each 
separately. Since better performance is gained when compiling the software 
oneself, the installer could do that as well. It could have scripts for 
finding necessary configure paths (like --with-gtk-config) and a field for 
custom configure flags for more advanced users.

Using Loki Games' installer would give a half-finished solution along with an 
update mechanism.

I would love to make this myself but I haven't got the skill nor the time.