WWW-diary of Juhapekka Tolvanen:

Saturday, 25 January 2003




07:19:35 EET (UTC +0200) @263

Heräsin jokin aika sitten.



20:34:24 EET (UTC +0200) @815

Keitin vielä yhden satsin sosekeittoa. Nyt on taas kaikki vanhempien tuomat pakastetut kesäkurpitsat käytetty keittoihin.

Kävin tossa ennen iltakuutta ostamassa vaikka mitä ruokaa.

Argh! Yleensä ihan hyvä jätkä nimeltä Jamie Zawinski kirjoitti tyhmän kirjoituksen Linuxin videokatseluohjelmista ja nyt sitä flametetaan Slashdotin threadissa. Kirjoitinpa äijälle meiliä:

Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 20:30:59 +0200
From: Juhapekka Tolvanen <juhtolv(at)iki(dot)fi>
To: jwz@jwz.org
Subject: About your review about video players on Linux
Lines: 115

        "I finally found RPMs of mplayer that would consent to install
        themselves on a Red Hat 7.2 machine, --- --- Their propose
        ``solution'' for distributing binaries on Red Hat systems?  They
        point you at an RPM that installs apt, the Debian package
        system!  Yeah, that's a good idea, I want to struggle with two
        competing packaging systems on my machine just to install a
        single app"

It is obvious, that you don't know about tools, that can help you to find
find and install packages, that some package you are going to install,
depends on. "apt" IS NOT packaging system of Debian. It is tool, that
was originally meant for dpkg-packages. "dpkg" is packaging system of
Debian, not "apt". Some years ago some people extended apt so, that it
can handle RPMs. With apt, you can say "apt-get install <some package>"
and then it downloads and installs BOTH that package you want AND those
packages it depends on (if they are not installed already, of course).
It makes life so easy, that it is not a miracle, it was made to handle
RPMs, too.

On the other hand, under RPM-based distros you really have to struggle
to find packages and their dependencies. Hence, it is not a miracle,
that people suggest you to switch to Debian. It has the biggest package
collection of all Linux-distros. And packages that those packages depend
on are included, too. You don't need to hunt them down all over the
Internet; just run "apt".

        "Well, I found some RPMs for Red Hat 7.2, but apparently they
        expect you to have already rectally inserted Gnome2 on that 7.2
        system first. Uh, no. I've seen the horror of Red Hat 8.0, and
        there's no fucking way I'm putting Gnome2 on any more of my
        machines for at least another six months, maybe a year."

If some program depends on _libraries_ of Gnome2 it does not mean that
you have to run that program under Gnome2-_desktop_. I have run
Konqueror under my Gnome 1.4.0. I think it would be possible to
Gnome2-programs under this Gnome-desktop or under KDE or under plain
window manager.

On the other hand, when you run Gnome2 under Red Hat 8.0, you are really
not running just Gnome2; I guess you are running Gnome2 SPOILED by Red
Hat.

Then you tried Xine. You are right about Xine: its GUI really sucks. But
guess what: Xine is not just a video player. It is a bunch of libraries.
Because of those libraries it is possible to create other video players,
that has better GUI than Xine itself and can open every video format
that Xine can. There already exist many Xine-based video players. My
favourite is gnome-xine. As the name suggests, it is has Gnome-GUI, but
it is not Gnome2-GUI. And it has no stupid skins or themes.

             You shouldn't even bother compiling the GUI into mplayer! 

        So I should solve the problem of ``crappy GUI'' by replacing it
        with ``no GUI at all?'' I should use the program only from
        the command line, or by memorizing magic keystrokes? Awesome idea.

Why not? It is really fast to do this: With some help from Tab-key go to
right directory with cd-command and then write "mplayer <filename>". It
is so simple. And it sounds ridiculous that Jamie Zawinski, the big
contributor of Esc-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift refuses to learn keyboard shortcuts
of mplayer. In fact those shortcuts are much easier than keyboard shortcuts
of emacs! But you are so ignorant, that you did not bother to check out,
how easy they really are:

juhtolv@heresy:/home/juhtolv % mplayer --help

(Major Clip)

Basic keys: (see the man page for the complete list, also check
input.conf)
 <-  or  ->      seek backward/forward 10 seconds
 up or down      seek backward/forward  1 minute
 pgup or pgdown  seek backward/forward 10 minutes
 < or >          step backward/forward in playlist
 p or SPACE      pause movie (press any key to continue)
 q or ESC        stop playing and quit program
 + or -          adjust audio delay by +/- 0.1 second
 o               cycle OSD mode:  none / seekbar / seekbar+timer
 * or /          increase or decrease pcm volume
 z or x          adjust subtitle delay by +/- 0.1 second
 r or t          adjust subtitle position up/down, also see -vop expand

 * * * SEE MAN PAGE FOR DETAILS, FURTHER (ADVANCED) OPTIONS AND KEYS! * * * *

I always run mplayer without GUI. I just checked out that GUI, and it
really sucks. And all those error messages goes to some dialog box, that
hides that video window itself. Most of those errors are so harmless,
that they really belong to stderr.

         An idiocy that all of these programs have in common is that, in
        addition to opening a window for the movie, and a window for the
        control panel, they also spray a constant spatter of curses crud on the
        terminal they were started from. I imagine at some point, there
        was some user who said, ``this program is pretty nice, but you know what
        it's missing?  It's missing a lot of pointless chatter about
        what plugins and fonts have been loaded!''

That is only partly true. It would be nice to have some quiet mode, of
course. But when something goes wrong, it is really nice to have good
debugging and diagnosing information. Therefore those video players are
so verbose.


Anyway, here is good Linux video-player round-up. Just check it out:


http://www.linuxorbit.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Reviews&file=index&req=showcontent&id=27



-- 
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen * * * http://iki.fi/juhtolv/index.html
"Lämmitä ei laatikot, ei rusinatkaan luumukiisselin. Riisipuuron
jäätyneen nyt verannalta sisään kiikutin. Ja kurkkuun jäänyt mantelikin
viimein irtoaa vaik' parempi kun pysytellyt ois vaan paikallaan." Viikate




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