[SGVLUG] linux based video conversion

[Dustin]

On Sat, 23 Jul 2005, Martin Bähr wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 11:01:27PM -0700, Dustin wrote:

> > The Debian debs have a bitter hatred of
> > mplayer so they don't ship it, 
> 
> again, licensing problems.
> the hatred comes from a claim that mplayer code itself was violating
> some license somewhere, my last reading is that this has been resolved,
> and mplayer should appear in debian eventually (ubuntu has it already)

I think you're right, but I know when I looked it seemed to go far beyond
just licencing.  There was definite bad blood.

> > I tried a
> > third-party build of mplayer on Debian once and it was just unusable,
> 
> where did you get that build from?
> i had hardly any issues with the mplayer builds i got from marillat
> always worked fine.

It was marillat's .deb.  For some reason it was just completely unstable.
I can't remember if it ever actually displayed video before crashing.

The truth is I've always had rather bad luck with unofficial builds.  I
might still be running Slack if the linuxpackages tarballs had worked for
me, but when I went to install gnomemeeting it required at least half a
dozen other unofficial packages and something just didn't work.  I could
have gone ahead and built everything by hand, but I decided that in the
long run I wouldn't really stay on top enough to keep up to date and so it
was worth switching in order to get package management (which was too bad,
because the base system was so stable and fast).

I have a few unofficial Debian builds and have had better luck there, but
mplayer was no good.  At least it didn't attempt to bring the machine down
with it as it did a few times on Gentoo (locked X IIRC).  That was very
likely because of overly aggressive CFLAGS and USE settings, though.

In the long run, when my disk issues get resolved I may move the machine
back to Gentoo partly because they are a bit more relaxed about the purity
of the package repository and so they have more packages that I actually
care about.

> ...(marillat btw is an official debian developer, so
> his mplayer packages, despite being unofficial, are not third party, but
> are as good as any official ones will be since he'll make those too)

Fine.  Unofficial, whatever.  They're not in the Debian system.  I think 
the win32 codecs are his too, though, and they work fine.

Dustin