On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 19:08:45 -0600
"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.

kaboodle needs at least 6-7 more codecs to stand a decent chance 
of being able to play a random chunk of video downloaded off the 
Web, which is what the average non-technical user wants a default
player *for*, and the video scene is a constantly moving target.
I think you've seriously underestimated the amount of work
involved here--pretty much every Linux video player that's even
minimally useful depends on ffmpeg, mplayer, xine, or gstreamer.
Anything else isn't practical.

kmplayer can (or could, at one time) use xine or gstreamer
backends in addition to mplayer.  I don't think that depending on
any one of those is excessive.

E. Liddell