Bug#699864: mplayer2 from experimental doesn't work with smplayer

[Ricardo Villalba]

I'm the developer of smplayer. I've just found this post:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=699864#14

Are you seriously considering to replace smplayer by smplayer2? Is
this for real?

smplayer2 is based on an old version of smplayer (0.8.0) while the
current version of smplayer is 0.8.4. It lacks a lot of things, like
the support for youtube. You would be dropping a whole year of my
work.

smplayer2 works better with mplayer2 because it's intented to be a gui
for mplayer2, so if mplayer2 removes the -fontconfig option they
remove as well in smplayer2 and that's it. But smplayer tries to work
with both mplayer and mplayer2, so I can't remove that option that
easily. By the way I've just compiled smplayer2 from git and it can't
work at all with the regular mplayer:

Unknown option on the command line: -gapless-audio
Error parsing option on the command line: -gapless-audio
MPlayer svn r34540 (Ubuntu), built with gcc-4.6 (C) 2000-2012

The problem of the -fontconfig option was fixed in smplayer a lot of
months ago (last november). It's not completely fixed because of the
way mplayer2 is packaged in ubuntu (I guess is the same in debian).
The problem is that the mplayer2 executable is called exactly the same
as mplayer: "mplayer". So smplayer can't know what application it is
until it's run for the first time. So when the first file is played it
still can fail with the -fontconfig problem because smplayer assumes
it's using mplayer, but once it knows it is actually mplayer2 it won't
use the -fontconfig option anymore.

In windows I fixed this problem very easily, in my packages I've
renamed mplayer.exe to mplayer2.exe, so smplayer knows the actual
application before running it, so the -fontconfig error never happens.
For me it would be easier if mplayer2 in linux had also a different
executable name.

-- 
RVM