“Me: How was MPlayer born? In case of many programs there are
serious things (in most cases the lack of something) which inspire
the developers. What was that for MPlayer?“Alex: As none of us was who started it, we can only share our
viewpoints of this. First Arpi just hacked xmmp (x multimedia
player), but later decided to write his own, based on some
libraries. The real shot was FFmpeg, however. The project was
started in 2000.
Diego: It was the lack of a good multimedia player for Linux, Arpi
found the players at the time to be buggy, feature-lacking, or all
of the above.
Oded: I’m a general developer. I have little bits in most major
components in MPlayer and MEncoder. I don’t maintain many
parts…”