On Mar 21, 2005, at 3:04 PM, Lan Barnes wrote:
Nope. I archived your list -- thank you -- and may return to it.
However, it was a long list, and since others seem to prefer VidroLAN,
and since it appears to come complete, trying it first seems reasonable.
Iam, to repeat, app agnostic in this ... and more than a little shy of
the dependency battles that long lists have led me into before.
Prefer is a bit of a strong word. I use mplayer as well as VideoLAN. Both seem to work okay. I have never had a xine install work reliably. It's probably my own fault, but I didn't want to waste the time to figure out the issue.
The main reason that I use VLC over mplayer is DVD navigation on anime DVD's. Many of these DVD's do really stupid sh*t in their "Snazzy Interactive Top Menu". VLC seems to have the most complete implementation of this stuff, and, even when it fails, it fails with an error message and quite often can still be coaxed to play the DVD. I have had xine, mplayer, and even OS X's DVD player actually hard lock the machine when presented with some of these stupid things.
Also, VLC just seems to eat every format in the universe by default. All of the weird soft and hard subtitling formats for anime stuff *just work*. It also never asks me about DECSS stuff; it pretty much just plays everything I can throw at it.
The only thing VLC cannot eat yet is WMV3. Thus my query on this list a couple of months ago.
What I would really like to find is a decent open-source DVD copier. Some of these anime DVD's are *expensive*, and I'd really like to make a backup. In addition, I'd like to be able to put the image on my hard drive so that I can watch it on the plane without spinning up my DVD.
Unfortunately, these DVD's do something stupid that doesn't directly copy or mount (even with Toast). Fortunately, Fast DVD Copy on OS X will actually duplicate these ( http://www.fastdvdcopy.com/ ). I'm probably going to spend the $99 (plus-it's a nice program, does what I want, and gets upgraded regularly; minus-it has the most annoying licensing key system I have ever dealt with), but I'd also like to support the open-source guys as they're the ones who prevent everybody from actually getting locked down.
-a
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