mplayer vs. xine

[Andrew Clunis]

Hello!

I used to be for Xine, but now I'm an mplayer guy.  mencoder has proved
especially handy.  And, indeed, I do find mplayer more stable.  It seems
to be a somewhat more active project (again, if I have this wrong,
please correct me).

As for file formats, it has great support on its own for most popular
formats that are reasonably "open", noteably OGG and the MPEGs.  It can
DVDs out of the box.  (on Fedora, you may find you have to ln -s
/dev/cdrom /dev/dvd)

Proprietary things like Windows Media, Real Media, and Quicktime can be
played (on x86 computers) using the wrapped Windows DLLs. With the full
kit out of mplayer and these wrapped binary codecs (available as add-ons
from mplayer's website, it's been able to play everything I've thrown at
it!  it was even able to stream Windows Media off an mms server, which
was very cool. (I might also note that mplayer makes a great
streamripper! In fact, I don't think there is any Windows player that
can rip WM streams.  Mplayer can).

Of course, the best solution is just to not use these ugly formats and
use Open and Free formats.  But if you have one of those files you
haven't much choice...

Another thing I like about mplayer is that it's gmplayer UI is very nice
for people who aren't geeks, which is a very good thing for GNU/Linux on
the desktop.  Brian, if you're using Fedora, just go to the mplayer
download page and use their RPMs, and you can pick and choose what
features you want. :)

Mplayer also has a mozilla plugin, but I kinda avoid that stuff, so I
can't really comment on its stability.

It would be really cool to see mplayer (just the Free Software program
itself, not any of the ugly wrapped binaries I mentioned above,
obviously) in Fedora, but I expect it won't happen because of patent
issues with MPEG, the same reason why xmms-mp3 got yanked.

Good luck!

Regards,
Andrew Clunis

On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 00:31, Brian C. Huffman wrote:
> I'd like to have a show of hands of who's for xine and who's for
> mplayer.  Which one is the better choice for a complete multimedia
> solution?  I've used both and have to say that I've had problems with
> both.  
> 
> With xine I've been able to play most all formats with the exception of
> Windows media (although I know the codecs are out there). I've gotten
> the gxine frontend which includes a plugin for mozilla.  Unfortunately
> I've had many many crashes of mozilla / xine when using the plugin.
> 
> With mplayer (which I've just recently installed), I've had better
> stability (although it has crashed on inline movies), but I don't know
> the extent of the formats that it can play.  Also I haven't seen a
> frontend to mplayer so far....I assume that one does exist.
> 
> Thoughts?  Experiences?
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> Brian
> 
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