JWZ Reviews Video on Linux 872
An anonymous reader writes "The inimitable JWZ goes once again forth and reviews the state of video on Linux. Expect no mercy."
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JWZ Reviews Video on Linux
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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
I like this guy, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This guy is way off base (Score:2, Informative)
Short answer: No, you don't matter. You're a politician, not a coder.
Long answer: If you wrote the original version of XEmacs and a little program called "Netscape", then people might listen to your opinions.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who is JWZ (Score:2, Informative)
It's a mindset. (Stating the obvious). (Score:4, Informative)
right, up : ffd ffffd
left, down : rev rrev
f : fullscreen
space : pause
That's 99.9% of what I do when I when I play movies and MPlayer does it REALLY well. No smegging around with codecs, plays broken
I'd really like to see this guy giving constructive criticisms. No, don't ask him to criticize my post, NO NO NO!
Don't use the MPlayer GUI (Score:2, Informative)
-vo device
Selects video output device. Some output devices like sdl, dga, and vesa will automatically select resolutions to fit your video. No resizing required.
-fs
The fullscreen option. It centers the image, sizes to your resolution, keeping the aspect ratio.
-zoom number
Like -fs but number is the factor to change the x/y size.
Examples for full screen play/better resizing:
mplayer -vo vesa file.avi
mplayer -fs file.avi
mplayer -zoom 2 file.avi
Re:This guy is an idiot (Score:4, Informative)
Implementing Netscape on Unix, and working on Mozilla, doesn't count?
Re:Audio-Cocks!!!! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:This guy is way off base (Score:3, Informative)
JWZ is a long-time UNIX/Linux guru. He's not some AOL goofball. He's been around long enough, and has proven himself enough, that he's worth listening to, even if he does say "fucktard." Criticism from the inside is very valuable. It keeps you from becoming delusional.
Re:Um (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention xscreensaver (which, I think, ships with every Linux distro out there), and a few other cool hacks.
Re:From the article... SUCKS. (Score:4, Informative)
Not only is Apple's X server a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but there is also a Carbon version of Emacs [man.ac.uk] for Jaguar. It has many packages including LaTeX, and is as simple to install as the Mac gets. "Enhanced Carbon Emacs" does not require an X server or the Terminal app, as it is a fully native Mac program.
You are not the only one who expected a video editing review. However, I do think the reviewer had some valid points. Some Linux application GUIs and themes can be very hard to use, even if they are cool looking. And Linux application installs still need work if Linux is to be on the desktop of ordinary people. Joe User wouldn't know the difference between apt and RPM.
Such issues need to be brought up and discussed if Linux is to move forward. They could be brought up much more professionally, though...
"The path of peace is yours to discover for eternity."
Japanese version of "Mothra" (1961)
Re:This guy is an idiot (Score:4, Informative)
So, uh, yeah, JWZ wrote XEmacs (Lucid Emacs), the Unix version of Netscape, and was instrumental in getting the Mozilla project up and running. What the fuck have you done, again?
Does anyone actually play video in a resized window? Surely only "normal" size and fullscreen are ever used? By the way, Windows Media Player up to version 6 at least did the same trick.
Oh, I didn't realize that a shitty "feature" is ok, as long as some old version of windows software did the same thing. After all, the point of any free software project isn't to create an excellent program in its own right, its just to emulate the equivalent windows version, flaws and all, right?
Because of course, mplayer is so hard to remember.
He was responding to the "advice" that to make MPlayer truely usable, he should simply not compile in the UI. You've got to admit, thats a truly, painfully shitty comment on the state of MPlayer's interface. It doesn't matter how easy you think the damn keystrokes are to remember, its still a fucking usability nightmare when the best piece of advice you can get is "Don't even bother to compile the UI"
Re:This review sucks.. (Score:0, Informative)
Re:I like this guy, but... (Score:5, Informative)
So here ya go. Mplayer is just a media player. It opens every media you can think of - mplayer [file] and it just works. Period. Set it up to be the default media player in your pretty GUI file manager and you'll never think about it again.
Interaction is a bit different than usual, i'll admit, but it's intuitive and easy once you get used to it. Different != bad. Key-presses are faster than grabbing the mouse and pointing it at something, especially if you're watching a DVD and just want to reach over and slap the spacebar to pause, or hit an arrow key repeatedly to skip forward or back. Mplayer's key mappings are easy to remember and logical - q for quit, f for fullscreen, space for pause, and arrow keys to skip forward and back. You can even adjust audio playback sync to the video, if you learn a bit about it. I'd argue that the average "idiot*" user could learn it and love it just fine - especially since it's one media player, and one interface, for every video (even audio) file on his or her system.
Mplayer GUI's aren't that bad either, whiners...
: )
*Very few are idiots, and many learn fast...don't think that just because you and I can program that means everyone else is retarded.
Re:Linux users must hate themselves (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hey, there is improvement! (Score:4, Informative)
(Insert gratuituous comment of Unix-Haters handbook webpage on Microsoft's site here)
Re:What a grumpy asshole (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is, he does make some good points. For example, why does everyone need to reinvent the GUI wheel (as if we didn't have enough widget sets and window managers to deal with on *nix)? Why does everything have to be skinable?
I use MPlayer extensively -- but I don't touch the GUI, I have a text-based front-end for it. When it comes to playing video files, scaling, utilizing my ATI's TV-Out, etc -- MPlayer kicks all sorts of ass.
However, it's such a common trend these days to make everything skinable, and to create one's own interface standards. That's one of the things I hate most about WMP for Windows (that, and it periodically just stops functioning).
It's one thing I hate about Mozilla (why can't they use the native menus and widgets?) -- though I use Mozilla exclusively, I still feel a lot of time was wasted implementing their own text box (that still doesn't work quite right), menus, etc...
While I personally use MPlayer, I can't say I'd recommend it to someone who doesn't know how to compile software (using a specific gcc version no less), figure out the appropriate command-line options, etc. Tried to walk a semi-linux-literate person through it, and he still has no working MPlayer. As for the GUI, I also wouldn't recommend it, for most of the reasons noted in Jamie's rant.
It misses the point (Score:3, Informative)
The real issue is that this should work with all formats out of the box without a lot of messing around or special configuration. It is much more of an integration issue for the distribution vendors than anything else. Ok, the hardware vendors have a role here too.
I read the LWCE stuff from Roblimo about his talk with the Dell reps. If they want to cred from us, they would do a better job of supporting their old hardware, then I might be more likely to actually buy a Dell if I ever get to buy a new computer. I had to open my box and guess which was the audio chip and read the numbers off it to figure out how to correctly configure my audio. I should be able to just get that information by just going to their support area and typing in my model number. I tried this and their site was remarkable unhelpful.
I managed to get some of the video functions to work, but mplayer seems to be a loss (my video hardware appears to be too old, and the system too slow to emulate everything). My browser plugin configuration just sucks, though. Plugger is installed and somewhat configured, and some media types will cause xine to fire up, but it just dies with no simple information about why. Maybe someday I will load a newer distribution (I'm RH7.3) on new hardware and everything will just work.
Oh, that brings up another stupidity in the JWZ review. His complaints about stuff dumped to the console. If you don't want it, how hard is it to direct to /dev/null? Sometimes, the only indication that you get of why things aren't functioning is a message dumped to the console. Often, I start up galeon from a console (because if you start if from a menu, the messages go to /dev/null, yet another way to easily ignore them) when something is breaking to see if the browser spits out some indication of what is wrong.
My biggest complaint is that there is no place to go for definitive information about all of this. People seem to imply that Xine will handle all formats, but it failed miserably when I tried in on an avi file (maybe I have to tell it the format? I thought it should figure it out ...). That's why I was installing mplaying in the first place, I thought I needed it for windows formats. If I really cared, I'm sure I could find the information, but who has time to root around for this kind of information all the time.
primA donna (Score:1, Informative)
In Italian -- as well as in my mother tongue, Portuguese -- the adjective (prima) must agree with the object it qualifies (donna).
For a man, you would say "primo uomo".
Keep in mind I can't speak Italian, but I guess gramatical structure is similar.
And, yes, English is somewhat simpler in that respect.
Re:Good points, but JWZ invokes Goodwin's Law (Score:2, Informative)
I think he's intentionally invoking it as a way of closing the discusion -- saying that he doesn't want you to write him and argue the point.