MPlayer 1.1 released

[Posted June 11, 2012 by corbet]

It turns out that the long wait for MPlayer 1.0 was in vain - the project went straight to a 1.1 release. "We gave up on 1.0 After a long pause, we decided that it might be a good idea to make a new release. While we had our fun with the naming scheme with lots of 'pre' and 'rc' it seemed time to move on and with everyone incrementing major versions between weekly and monthly we hope to be forgiven for jumping ahead to 1.1." There's a lot of new stuff in this audio and video player release, much of which comes from the recent FFmpeg 0.11 release.

MPlayer 1.1 released

Posted Jun 11, 2012 14:11 UTC (Mon) by tsdgeos (guest, #69685) [Link] (7 responses)

Speaking of ffmpeg: Does anyone know how the split/fork between ffmpeg and libav ended? Are they still separate developer groups?

MPlayer 1.1 released

Posted Jun 11, 2012 17:21 UTC (Mon) by carlm (guest, #84710) [Link] (3 responses)

Both projects still going and still separate.

FFmpeg has more features and development seems to be happening at a faster rate. Libav are going for stability but lack some features, but there is no evidence that it has fewer bugs than FFmpeg (while there is definite evidence that it lacks features).

Most distributions still have FFmpeg as default. Notably Debian ships Libav, as I believe the Debian packager is one of those people that had personal issues with Michael Niedermeyer (FFmpeg lead developer).

MPlayer 1.1 released

Posted Jun 11, 2012 18:05 UTC (Mon) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]

Care to give some proof of that? I admit that I have not been following the mailing lists in the last two or three months but it seems to me that libav was consistently more active since the fork.

MPlayer 1.1 released

Posted Jun 12, 2012 10:21 UTC (Tue) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (1 responses)

If I've understood correctly and looking at the mailing lists, libav is far more active but ffmpeg basically utilizes libav as a kind of upstream, merging from there to itself (on a daily basis was mentioned by the ffmpeg developer at some point IIRC). ffmpeg has also sped up on version number front.

It's not only Debian using libav, but also Ubuntu, so basically a majority of Linux users are using libav. Fedora and openSUSE on the other hand do not include either one because of patent encumberment issues, instead they're only installable from third party repositories. The 3rd party repositories were ffmpeg oriented last I checked.

From what I've also understood, the developer groups are still as separate as in the beginning. It would be nice if LWN wrote an article of the split, but I believe it's very hard topic to handle (really) properly. Almost everything about it is full of IIRC:s, AFAIK:s, guesses and personal e-mails. Some things could be said with all fairness of personalities clashing, but still.

MPlayer 1.1 released

Posted Jun 12, 2012 22:38 UTC (Tue) by mhm (subscriber, #45669) [Link]

Also, ffmpeg has recently applied to become an SPI Associated project:
http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2012-May/0...

MPlayer 1.1 released

Posted Jun 11, 2012 19:30 UTC (Mon) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (2 responses)

Count me as happy about the split. There was a period of several weeks very recently, on Debian unstable, when totem wouldn't play anything, but smplayer continued working (mostly) fine. When two interchangeable products are equally buggy, the split is helpful when the bugs don't overlap much.

MPlayer 1.1 released

Posted Jun 12, 2012 19:01 UTC (Tue) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link] (1 responses)

Totem uses gstreamer, not FFmpeg (nor libav).

MPlayer 1.1 released

Posted Jun 12, 2012 20:05 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

It can if you are using the gst-ffmpeg plugin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GStreamer_FFmpeg_plug-in#Plu...

This is similar to how you can use ffmpeg from DirectShow or QuickTime. It's pretty nice and is usually one of the first items I install on a new Linux system.