[MPlayer-users] The future of mplayer

[Tuukka Toivonen]

On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Juho Vähä-Herttua wrote:

>First of all, I read that whole thread (at least I think so) in debian
>mailing list and I was really disappointed. In both of you. Both sides

(A pointer to archives would be nice.. i'd like to see myself)

>should develop some good interface between the player and the codec
>modules

I definitely agree (but I haven't looked, maybe it is there already)

>people _really_ need. They need a good media player alright and you have
>succeeded better than others

But a media player is not the only thing people need, but also video
editing software, conversion programs, etc...

Mplayer can decode a huge number of formats and also encode many. What
people (like me) would need is a generic library of format converters.
Specify source and target formats, then the library would find the shortest
path (least conversions) betweem the formats, load the needed libraries,
and do the job.

I've begun planning a library like this, Hermes could do RGB<>RGB
conversions and ccvt RGB<>YUV conversions, and Mplayer has good support for
compressed formats. And I definitely hope it would be easy to use Mplayer
codecs (and if they're moved in generic libraries, that would make job so
much easier).