Bug#732159: Should this package be removed?

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 14.12.2013, at 23:53, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> On 12/14/2013 11:07 PM, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
>> On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Moritz Muehlenhoff <jmm at debian.org> wrote:
>>> Package: mplayer
>>> Severity: serious
>>> 
>>> Should this package be removed? If so, please reassign to ftp.debian.org
>>> 
>>> - Last upload nearly two years ago
>>> - FTBFS for a long time
>>> - Incompatible with current libav
>>> - Alternatives exist (mplayer2, mpv)
> 
> Well, to be honest, I think the problem is actually libav, not mplayer.
> Most users prefer the original ffmpeg over libav from my own experience.
> 
> And there are new upstream releases of mplayer which are actually more
> frequent and active than mplayer2:
> 
> - mplayer: current stable release 1.1.1, released May 6th, 2013
> - mplayer2: current stable release 2.0, released: March 24th, 2011
> 
> Even the latest git commit for mplayer2 is older than the current
> stable release of mplayer. The latter seems much more active to me.
> 
> So, what I'd rather like to see is that we get a proper ffmpeg
> back in Debian again which would also allow to update mplayer
> to the current upstream version. There is even an RFP for
> that [1]. But I guess this is not going to happen.
> 
> I'm still a bit sad that the split among the ffmpeg people
> happened.
> 
> Adrian
> 
>> [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=729203

I thought someone was working on it already, but I am happy to help out both with getting a parallel install of FFmpeg working (via a rpath hack for example, supported in FFmpeg configure but probably needs fixes to MPlayer's configure to work) and to a limited degree also making MPlayer work with Libav.
However the latter would need a proper maintainer, and Libav misses quite a few features MPlayer needs, so it would be problematic and the result questionable IMHO.
I am assuming nobody in Debian wants to compile MPlayer statically/against an "internal" copy of FFmpeg.

Reimar