Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

mpv.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 576 posts

Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

#211

Post by KingMob »

Levitating wrote: post #178
justin66 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The developer responds to a comment: But many players are able to do it for years. with: If it's so easy, why are you not doing it? He's not just a butthole, he's a stereotypical open source developer butthole. On the other hand, if he worked for Microsoft, he'd be claiming that it takes a PhD to do it...

In his defense, some commenters had a pretty rude attitude. You cannot demand developers to implement a feature or call them out on being lazy. Nobody even offered to research how other players accomplish this. They just expect that because they believe it can be done someome should do the work for them. At least Remi was actually andering questions on the forums. This attitude towards open source maintainers is what…

As a FOSS maintainer, I have sympathy for him, but as a communicator, I see he really failed to address multiple commenters pointing out that several other FOSS video projects had the feature. (At least in the first page of comments.)

Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

#212

Post by nine_k »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #103
b112 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical that rust magically deals with, for example, character sets in 30 year old subtitle files, in a way that makes C seem inadequate. Legacy compatibility has value.

The correct place to handle character sets is when you're reading the file, not to sprinkle it all throughout your program.

Locales are so much more than character sets. E.g. an Arabic locale changes the direction of writing, it also changes the characters used for numbers, and completely changes the way numbers and dates are formatted. This is where the C locale functions are problematic.

Character encoding is the easy and safe part.

Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

#213

Post by a-dub »

lairv wrote: post #69

I use it to inspect video frames by frames, particularly being able to go back one frame. VLC doesn't support it, this thread about the feature is hilarious https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=120627

i can imagine how it would be annoying in a system that is designed to process live streams as opposed to one that is designed to have random access to the stream via persistent storage.

if the target frame were not an i frame, you'd have to dig up the preceding i frame and replay everything up to the target frame. pretty easy for random access, not so much for a monotonic stream of frames.

Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

#214

Post by vharish »

ziml77 wrote: post #170
j1elo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow those answers are indeed funny. I agree that as an OSS dev/maintainer, it's easy to fall on the vice of over-generalization and crusade for the perfect solution, and it feels that's exactly what happened there. > this feature is algorithmically impossible > You're just looking at one specific video, not the general problem. > is not generally possible. As a fellow multimedia dev, man, who cares? Sometimes we forg…

I notice a lot of devs try to deny the chaos of the world. It's almost like the code is where they go to hide from things that can't be cleanly and unambiguously expressed. I don't know how they get away with that though. In the coding work that I do, I'm constantly dealing with rules that have exceptions on top of exceptions. I just need to special-case some things, because the alternative is not delivering what the…

This is a very broad generalization and not a good one either. Particularly in this context. It's obviously not possible to do it for all video formats in a consistent way. I haven't read through all of it yet I could tell all the proposed solutions are hacky ones. Your scenario doesn't apply here. Businesses are different. This is on open source project. Anyone can work on it.

What are you even saying about the choas of the world?! Every dev knows how work is. You are just describing every other software job. Somehow it sounds like you are boasting how matured you are just because you do what your client asks/needs. Even then, many business/software make a concious choice to support or not support something based on some guidance. The guidance could be some core principles or just some product managers whim.

It's highly likely that VLC developers chose not to support the feature for the very reason(s) that's described in the post. It's a concious choice they made. I don't see anything wrong in that. They definitely are not some school kids with some daddy issues to hide behind some code. They clearly have answered all the questions from a technical stand point.

Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

#215

Post by vharish »

jbverschoor wrote: post #173
ziml77 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I notice a lot of devs try to deny the chaos of the world. It's almost like the code is where they go to hide from things that can't be cleanly and unambiguously expressed. I don't know how they get away with that though. In the coding work that I do, I'm constantly dealing with rules that have exceptions on top of exceptions. I just need to special-case some things, because the alternative is not delivering what the…

And this is exactly the problem when these devs are in charge of creating systems that actually do matter. They will not support edge cases, problems in a process, etc.

I mean.. can you show anyone piece of software or hardware or for that matter any man made creation that solves for all edge cases?

Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

#217

Post by admdly »

ziml77 wrote: post #170
j1elo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow those answers are indeed funny. I agree that as an OSS dev/maintainer, it's easy to fall on the vice of over-generalization and crusade for the perfect solution, and it feels that's exactly what happened there. > this feature is algorithmically impossible > You're just looking at one specific video, not the general problem. > is not generally possible. As a fellow multimedia dev, man, who cares? Sometimes we forg…

I notice a lot of devs try to deny the chaos of the world. It's almost like the code is where they go to hide from things that can't be cleanly and unambiguously expressed. I don't know how they get away with that though. In the coding work that I do, I'm constantly dealing with rules that have exceptions on top of exceptions. I just need to special-case some things, because the alternative is not delivering what the…

Outside of those contributing to open source projects professionally, the vast majority of contributors will (naturally) be those with greater technical abilities, which unfortunately impacts the general UX of free/OSS overall in my opinion.

Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

#218

Post by vharish »

opan wrote: post #175
darby_nine wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VLC is pretty bad and it shows the more you use it. Compared to what? Such a statement is meaningless without comparison.

Compared to mpv. Some would also say compared to mpc-hc.

I don't think the target audience are the same. Not so sure about this. Just my impression.

Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

#219

Post by nine_k »

Bluestein wrote: post #77
mixmastamyk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While great in general, vlc has many small seek/sync issues, and also seems to be in maintenance mode.

> to be in maintenance mode. Sad to hear.- PS. On a tangent, rethorically - baring bugs and security - at one point is (if ever) software "finished"? "We built this search engine. It works. The infrastructure has team enough to run it. But we have this huge payroll of people." So "improvements" and "features" (and constant UI and UX changes) ... ... "enshittification" ensues.- When is "good enough" ... good enough?

A web search engine is never done because spammers never cease attempts to.game it in new ways, and because new phenomena keep appearing on the web, from presidents posting official news on twitter to the proliferation of AI-generated texts with subtly incorrect information.

A media player, though, has fewer challenges.

Re: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

#220

Post by Dylan16807 »

nine_k wrote: post #212
Dylan16807 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The correct place to handle character sets is when you're reading the file, not to sprinkle it all throughout your program.

Locales are so much more than character sets. E.g. an Arabic locale changes the direction of writing, it also changes the characters used for numbers, and completely changes the way numbers and dates are formatted. This is where the C locale functions are problematic. Character encoding is the easy and safe part.

Locales are much more than character sets, but the question was about character sets.

Also for most of those things, you want to be explicit about when to use the locale and when to not.

Post reply on HN