Hi. On Mon 2002-11-18 at 08:42:57 +0100, Yves Duret wrote: > On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 12:53:24PM +0000, Adam Williamson wrote: > > On Fri, 2002-11-15 at 12:41, Guillaume Rousse wrote: > > > Now that i had some success with other transfer requests, what about the > > > ultimate multimedia player under linux, aka mplayer ? > > > > > > It is not the most politically correct package, for sure, but it is legaly > > > clean (otherwise it won't even be in contrib), and its presence in main would > > > definitevely boost mdk on desktop. > > > > Xine does just about everything mplayer does... > > time to be less "monocentric" on multimedia apps. > and time to drop out thnigs like xanim (is it still existing ?). > The xine standard ui is not easy to understand, peek your > windows-mediaplayer-addict mother in front of it, and see..
No need to take some mother... I yesterday tried xine for the first
time due to this discussion.
I consider myself quite computer literate, but I needed several
minutes with the GUI until I figured out how to playback an .avi file.
Half of the icons do not trigger any association with me. I had to try
out all but the most obvious (play, stop, pause, ...).
What irritated me most that I had to use the playlist, which I closed
again at once, the first time I encountered it (because I wanted to
load one movie, not specify a list of files). A bit later I gave up
and specified a one-item list, because I found no other way. I did not
bother to look longer if there is a better way, it is well possible
that there is one - but if there is, for me it was not intuitive to
find. I neither tried the CLI afterwards.
The options window with all its tabs is also frustating. There are a
lot of options, which have a non-obvious effect (and that though I am
familiar with the mplayer options). If I have to look up the docu,
what is the benefit of having that in the GUI?
I do know, that there are always options that are useful once you know
them (e.g. DAO, TAO, etc. with cd writers), but as I said, I am
familiar with mplayer options, so I think I know the basic vocabulary.
Enough for that rant. I did not intended it to become one. I only now
realized, how frustating the experience with xine was. And I thought
mplayer was bad when it struck me down on first sight with the pure
number of options it has. At least "mplayer movie.avi" simply
worked. ;-) (I know, I know, probably that also works with xine).
Regards,
Benjamin.
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