On 4 February 2014 20:08, Darrell Anderson <darrella@...> wrote:
>>7) all distros support mplayer in one form or another
>
> I suppose this is a packager problem, but the original idea of a
> default player is no external dependencies.

That's only half true, since our default packages depend on plenty of
libraries and utilities

> MPlayer is well supported but is not part of a stock installation
> on all distros. Other dependency presumptions exist in Trinity (for
> example, xine for amarok), yet nominating kmplayer as a default
> video player and moving into tdemultimedia means MPlayer needs to
> be installed.

Why the NIH syndrome? mplayer is good, requires little work, and is a
clean dependency. Should we rewrite all the codec libraries for
kaboodle? essentially all mplayer is seen doing is drawing the video,
basically like a library dependency.

> Audio players are not the same challenge. We have kaboodle, noatun,
> and juk, all installed by the base package tdemultimedia.
>
> Fixing kaboodle gets us half way home. The other half is update
> kaboodle to support newer generations of avi/mpg and like or not,
> probably should support flv. For a default player that will
> suffice. People who want extensive video format coverage are going
> to install something else anyway.

I think that is going to be harder than you think, since there are
even now more codecs emerging like WebM.

> For Trinity users those additional apps will be kaffiene and
> kmplayer for video and amarok for audio. Not a problem for those
> types of users. We are discussing a basic default video player for
> the first-time out-of-the-box Trinity experience.

Which is why we should use something that users can play all videos
with, something that works without additional program needing to be
installed