This is a historical document, last updated in July 2005. Since then other people have left
mplayer behind. I now use mpv , which addresses
most of my concerns below.
I've had a love-hate relationship with mplayer: on the one hand, it is
immensely fragile and seems to pay more attention to silly “skins” than to
functionality. On the other hand, it seems to be the best available. And since it's free, I can
at least try to fix it. That's what I started to do in June 2005. This page is a list of what I plan to do and
a log of what I have achieved.
Do you want to help? Then contact me.
Why am I going it alone?
The obvious thing to do here is to get involved with the mplayer project. Why am I not
doing so? I'm certainly not trying to fork the project, but at the moment I don't have time to
get involved with a project which seems to have such different aims from my own. Of course any
changes will be available for reincorporation in the mplayer project, and if I make
enough changes, I may join the project. But at the moment it's just experimental.
To do
-
Stop stupid error messages like “Your system is too SLOW to play this”.
Status: done.
-
Fix 16:9 display:
-
Autodetect the screen geometry (i.e. no -monitoraspect needed)
Status: Done.
-
Use full screen width, not only full height, at least as an option.
mplayer has a way of doing this, but it's ugly: a combination of the
-zoom, -x and -y options sets the normal size to be
full screen. The “full screen remains as before, i.e. smaller than the
“normal” size.
-
Don't go crazy on a SIGINT (and don't SIGBUS afterwards).
-
Change the timing of the forward and backward commands. This should be configurable in the
config file. Maybe it is.
Status: Done. Yes, there's a file ~/.mplayer/input.conf that has this
information in there. We still need a usable description, but the default definitions are
there, so it's relatively easy to guess how to change them. I'm still experimenting with
how to set the times, but the next item on the list might help, once I understand the
mechanics a bit better.
-
On forward 30 sec command:
-
Backspace a predetermined time (about 2 seconds) to see the end of the previous
frame).
-
If issued in rapid succession, time the 30 seconds from the end of the last skip, not
the next press. Don't backspace more than once.
-
Resume after pause: sync with video, don't jump to audio.
-
Slow motion: auto-mute. Don't jump on resume.
-
Don't start any stupid skin.
-
Don't create overlarge icons.
-
Allow specification of a name in the icon.
-
Display running commentary only on verbose option.
-
Fix time display. Currently it seems to wrap around after about 2 hours.
-
Fix Makefiles:
-
Rename to GNUmakefile
-
Get dependencies right. In particular, changes in subdirectories don't cause
top-level gmake to rebuild anything.
-
Make time information positionable; currently it doesn't fit in a 16:9 display.
