"In the year since it first appeared on freshmeat , the
popular watering hole for Linux software, a relatively small new
project headed up by Arpad Gereoffy has shoved everything else out
of the way to become the most popular offering on the site save
Linux itself. The project is MPlayer, and it provides Linux users
with a tool to let them view videos in almost every popular flavor,
including MPEG 1 and 2, and AVI. It also plays video from DVDs.
When it is installed and configured correctly, it's a doozy. That's
the good news.
The bad news is the installation stinks, configuration is a
black art, and the documentation is barren. Worse yet, Gereoffy and
the other developers have more attitude than the law allows. At
least the law in this county, and I'm the sheriff. In just a year,
that attitude has gotten them on the wrong side of Red Hat, of
Russian developers porting a clone to OS/2, and many of their own
users.
The MPlayer gang seems to relish nothing more than belittling
their users and reminding them of just how little they know about
Linux and computing in general. I don't know about the rest of you,
but I suffer enough of that on my own. I do not need any outside
assistance to reinforce that point of view."
