[MPlayer-users] Re: [Obscure] MPlayer/MEncoder features?

[Ashok Thirumurthi]

Attila Kinali <attila <at> kinali.ch> writes:

> This is in the documentation

Aber, danke, ich meine.  It's good to know that it's largely my inability to 
make sense of the documentation.

However to make up the gap, I'll need to know what to look for in the 
documentation.  For instance, it's obvious that a movie player doesn't play 
stills.  However, it could convert stills to movies and I'd never know and how 
would you go to sleep at night?

Let's take one point as an example:

>> Can I extract poster frames and ending frames from movies to construct 
transitions?

I found out that I can using -frames and -vo.  But look at the gap between the 
question, the docs and the partial answer:

−frames <number>
 Play/convert only first <number> frames, then quit.

...then miles later in the docs...

Video output drivers are interfaces to different video output facilities. The 
syntax is:
 
 −vo <driver1[:suboption1[=value]:...],driver2,...[,]>
 
...surely this is now obvious... 

  mplayer -nosound -frames 1 -vo jpeg file.mpg

I found the answer in this list.  What should I search for in the docs to 
answer such a question?  The docs contain no reference to the terms that I 
used.  The FAQ didn't address such technical points.


> wer soviel schoggi isst, kann sowieso nicht dumm sein 

What does schoggi mean?  Never mind, it's probably in a dictionary that 
I didn't search.  One can clearly learn how to use a language from a 
dictionary.

- Ashok Thirumurthi