[MPlayer-dev-eng] MPlayer name change

[Adam Rice]

Quoting Diego Biurrun (diego at biurrun.de):
>  > Why not The Player then? It plays not only movies...
> 
> Could be "MPlayer - The Media Player" then.

I think this is a horrible idea. MPlayer is a movie player, there's no shame
in that. The world is full of movie players trying to be MP3 players, and MP3
players trying to be movie players. As a result, all three of RealPlayer,
Quicktime and Windows Media Player have now sprouted laughably bad skinned
interfaces, and Winamp tries to take over the .avi extension with its godawful
movie-playing interface (that sometimes forgets to open the movie window!).

An MP3 player needs to run for hours or days at time. It needs to share
real-estate with other applications, and needs to be able to change its
appearance when the user gets sick of it. The user interface should be geared
towards providing information like "what the hell am I listening to?" and
performing actions like "please make this horrible song go away."

A movie player only needs to run when the user is watching a movie. Since most
people will not do anything else while watching a movie, it can reasonably
take over the whole screen. The user interface needs to be there when it's
needed, and get the hell out of the way the rest of the time. The user
interface should be geared towards providing information like "how much more
of this shit do I have to sit through?" and performing actions like
"fast-forwarding to the good bit.".

Sure it would be possible to have an application that performs both of these
roles, but I for one don't want one. I already have an MP3 player. Actually, I
have several. I don't need another one. MPlayer should do one thing, and do it
well.

Adam

-- 
Adam Rice -- adamrice at ntlworld.com -- Blackburn, Lancashire, England