MPlayer Weekly News #2 - December 10th, 2002 ============================================ Here's the long-awaited second issue! It was planned to release it on Sunday (8th Dec), but sadly MPlayerHQ.hu was down and I haven't had enough time to write it. I want to thank you for the tons of replies I got (mostly questions and translations). 1, MPlayerHQ.hu was down for a day On Sunday the router of our Internet provider crashed. No, our server was working nice, so it can handle all the traffic. I've seen many users reporting that the server can't handle all that much traffic. Please do not try to send such mails to the mailing lists, as we knew the problem in the first second. Anyway, it's nice to see that you care about us! 2, Server hosting needed! As you can see in the 1st point, we have some trouble with the network. So if you can provide some help in hosting our midi-tower based server, please contact us! Also it shouldn't cost us money and a good international connection (>= 1mbit) is appreciated (and needed)! 3, New MPlayer (pre)release is out! As you should have noticed the new package got the -rc1 version tag appended. Yes, we're going to release the final 0.90 (or 1.0?) soon. After that a new chapter will begin in the history of our beloved player. It can be downloaded from the homepage or the mirrors! (Mirrors: www2 or www3.mplayerhq.hu) 4, RPM packages released. Dominik Mierzejewski was very fast in releasing the RPM package of version 0.90-rc1. Get it from http://www.piorunek.pl/~dominik/linux/pkgs/mplayer/ or from one of the following mirrors: http://mirrors.sctpc.com/dominik/linux/pkgs/mplayer/ http://ftp.falsehope.com/home/rathann/mplayer/ (both are located in the USA) 5, New mailing lists Two mailing lists have been created in the meantime, MPlayer-MWN and MPlayer-announce. The announce list, as it's name states, will be used only for announcing new features, releases and MWNs. It's read-only and the replies should go only to the -users list. Many of you have already subscribed to it and to -MWN too. Please note that the later one is only for the MWN editors and translators. 6, NEWS gateway to the mailing lists There were again questions about why we are using the old mailing list way and why we aren't using a news-server instead. The answer is: It's good and working. But here's good news for those of you, who don't like this type of forum: there's a news-server hosting our lists, too! It's name is GMANE (http://www.gmane.org), and it is a bidirectional mailing list-news gateway (this means that it's fully functional). Most of the bigger lists are available there: gmane.comp.video.mplayer.devel = mplayer-dev-eng@mplayerhq.hu gmane.comp.video.mplayer.user = mplayer-users@mplayerhq.hu gmane.comp.video.mplayer.user.dvb = mplayer-dvb@mplayerhq.hu gmane.comp.video.mplayer.user.matrox = mplayer-matrox@mplayerhq.hu (gmane.comp.video.mplayer.weekly-news = mplayer-mwn@mplayerhq.hu) 7, New feature It's finally there! Arpi has committed a new way of detecting streams (video, audio, ...) in the QuickTime demuxer. Now it selects the bigger streams automatically. It prints a line, which looks like this: MOV: best streams: A: #1 (295 samples) V: #0 (3543 samples) or this: MOV: best streams: A: #2 (926 samples) V: #1 (11552 samples) We don't want to see more bug reports about the Two Towers trailer! It's just annoying! 8, QuickTime efforts Yes, there are still improvements in that code! Now the extra dlls (qtextras.tar.bz2) are supported out-of-the-box too! And the low-bitrate QDMC decoding is fixed! Visit the codecs page for the updated tarballs! 9, New pages on the site The codecs page has moved to http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/ which has an extra advantage: it is mirrored! There's also a new directory that collects the font packs distributed with the player: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/fonts/ Finally, the home of MWN has moved to: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/mwn/ 10, Wishlist Diego Biurrun finally collected the wishes! If you have a feature request, please read the current wishlist carefully and do not request features that were already added. The wishlist can be found in the CVS repository: main/DOCS/tech/wishlist 11, Efforts in other projects of the open source media processing scene: FFmpeg with clustering support Yes, it works, really! A guy, named Mans Rullgard has done it (who is also working in MPlayerXP :) It isn't available yet, but it sounds very promising. Just some raw measurements: "# CPUs Relative speedup 1 1 2 1.8 3 2.5 4 3.2 5 3.8 I used 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 single-CPU machines with 100 Mbit/s NICs. The network is rather busy and the machines were most likely in use (they belong to the university)." For more information visit the homepage of the FFmpeg Project at http://www.ffmpeg.org/ or http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/ Okay, this doesn't mean any advantages in MEncoder, but never mind that every time we use MPlayer we have to thank the FFmpeg developers. They brought the libavcodec library to us, which is heavily used in open source media players. 12, Weekly fun Thanks for the many replies to Gabucino regarding his SCSI problems. He was very angry at me for publishing that, and said that the real problem is that his old device needs terminators and such. So now he needs them. Feel free to donate!:) -- Impressum: Homepage: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/mwn/ Authors: Alex Beregszaszi and Istvan Sebestyen Additional corrections by onetom, szabszi and Diego.