On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 08:13:42PM +0530, Girish Venkatachalam wrote:
quoted text
> On 13:44:00 Nov 14, Jacob Meuser wrote:
> > 
> > IMO vlc has higher quality playback of most media, can do things
> > mplayer can't, has a nicer ui, etc, etc ...
> > 
> 
> UI?
> 
> Well I am a command line person. 

command line media player.  sorry, but that doesn't make sense, IMO.
I mean, if you're playing a video, you have a video window .. it's
graphical by nature.

quoted text
> mplayer cannot understand DVD menus. That is the only problem mplayer
> has IMHO.

that's pretty basic functionality of a media player, no?

quoted text
> I honestly tried vlc. But it was too GUI oriented,

$ vlc --help | wc -l
VLC media player 0.8.6c Janus
     169
$ mplayer --help | wc -l
     39
$ 

quoted text
> all sorts of ugly
> output like KDE and other C++ junk out there...

yes, in -current the vlc port can be built with aRTs and Esound
support, and it does use wxWidgets for the GUI.  however, it does
have a curses UI: vlc -I curses.

quoted text
> Now I again it is my opinion. 
> 
> Can you tell me what vlc can do that mplayer can't?

rtp stream server.  sound server output (in -current).  playing
mpeg movies in firefox.

quoted text
> Have you tried to "study" mplayer's man pages, the html documentation
> and stuff?

yes.  it's a mess.  how can e.g, mpg321 know that file.m3u is a playlist,
but mplayer needs to have -playlist specified?  and if -playlist is
not specified, it complains about missing win32-codecs???

quoted text
> It takes a long time to learn but once learnt you start feeling that it
> is the best thing since sliced bread.

actually, the more I use it, the less I like it.

quoted text
> This article should give an idea.
> 
> http://linuxjournal.com/9787

I see a statements like:

It is a mature application that has no parallel.  MEncoder, it companion
video encoder program, does a much better job than FFMPEG in transcoding
video, although it is a bit difficult to use and learn.

that have no basis.  how and why MEncoder "does a much better job than
FFMPEG in transcoding video"?  there is no comparison whatsoever
between ffmpeg transcoding and mplayer transcoding.  further, mplayer/
mencoder are heavy users of libavcodec/libavformat (FFMpeg libraries).
that's what all those 'lavc*' options are.

$ ffmpeg -i input.avi -target ntsc-dvd dvd.mpg

takes any AVI input and outputs a DVD compliant NTSC mpeg2 PS.  what
is the mplayer equivilent?

-- 
jakemsr@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org