[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: help on libmpdemux usage

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 06:33:55PM +0100, Romain Dolbeau wrote:
> D Richard Felker III wrote:
> 
> >>Wrong. QuickTime is also required to display YUV image
> >>in an overlay, and that's exactly what every media
> >>player on macosx does, including mapleyr and vlc.
> >
> >Can you verify this?
> 
> Of course. Both of them (mplayer through SDL) use
> "DecompressSequenceFrameS", a function found

What a horribly named function...

> in the QuickTime header ImageCompression.h.
> Relevant source files are "SDL_QuartzYUV.m"
> for SDL and "vout.m" for VLC (it's objective-C
> code). Of course there's a lot of other functions
> called :-)
> 
> >No, it's your misconception. What you're saying is analogous to saying
> >"Windows browses the web". It doesn't, Internet Explorer does.
> >Bundling unrelated functionality together and calling it the same
> >thing is a lame marketing ploy, nothing more.
> 
> Something like 10 or 15 years ago, (more likely
> 10 but it's less impressive to just say 10 :-)
> when Apple first released QuickTime, they thought
> that, somehow, decompressing and displaying still
> pictures and movies *was* related.

Maybe you don't need to decompress to display images, for example if
they're coming from a game rather than a movie. Associating the
overlay with movies is making an unnecessary assumption. The overlay
should just be a part of the general video api.

> Many people,
> including me, think that they were right, and still
> are. For most people, the *point* of decompressing
> an image is to *display* it. Transcoding isn't
> the main use of media player and libraries, no
> matter how many dvd get ripped.

It's still unnecessary and silly to have decoding tied to a display
system. Transcoding _is_ a big important use, especially with crap
like telecine where you need an insanely fast computer to play it
realtime without transcoding first.

> Unlike your example, there *never* was 2 different
> components that got "merged".

Originally there wasn't an overlay layer, so it was just the
integration of the player and the codecs, which was even dumber.

Rich