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

Ricardo Villalba smplayer.dev at gmail.com
Wed Mar 27 13:37:30 UTC 2013


2013/3/27 Reinhard Tartler <siretart at gmail.com>:

> Would it be possible to have smplayer detect the version of the
> mplayer binary in some other way, such as by looking at some
> environment variable or looking at some file in the system? I would
> guess that the environment variable approach might be portable and
> allow easy testing during the development of smplayer. Moreover, it
> would allow me to locate the best location in the source-code to hook
> a distro-specific check into.
>
> What do you think?

The environment variable could work if all distros implemented it,
otherwise the problem would be fixed on debian only.

I can make smplayer to run "mplayer -v" to get the info, but
mplayer/mplayer2 are large applications and take some time to load, so
that would increase the startup time of smplayer, that's why I didn't
want to do that so far.

Another possible fix, easy to do: install mplayer2 as
/usr/bin/mplayer2 but add also the symlink /usr/bin/mplayer ->
/usr/bin/mplayer2. This way smplayer could detect the symlink and find
out the actual executable name.

But I would suggest to allow the user to have both mplayer and
mplayer2 installed at the same time. Currently if you install mplayer2
it replaces mplayer and vice versa. Both applications are similar but
they are not the same. mplayer2 has interesting new things, like
support for ordered chapters, but it also has its own issues and some
videos play better in mplayer. For me it's a problem not being able to
have both applications installed at the same time.

Besides there's now another mplayer fork, called mpv
(https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/README.rst), if it's
added some day to debian, will you also name the executable "mplayer"?
I wouldn't find very logic to have 3 different applications with the
same executable name. For me it would be very difficult to support the
3 applications if they all have the same name.

-- 
RVM



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