[Kyuusai]

Originally Posted by Nicholi

LNow that people actually know about the feature and how to use it (/me blames self for not writing some stupid guide years ago) the tendency to use it is likely to rise. You should be encouraging more people to use it so it has a higher chance of getting implemented. Otherwise you are just going to get stuck with the small growing percentage of files that have it, while you still don't have the feature implemented into your player. Also I seriously doubt you could find something which will "only play" on Linux. Typically code from these types of opensource projects are written in a platform-independent way. No one wants to use something which is hardcoded to a single platform, it has no way to grow that way. This feature is by no means platform dependent to Windows, it is simply that no one on your team (I lawled when I wrote that) has taken the time to do it :P. So pulling the "only plays on Windows" doesn't ring that true in this case. Also it's not some hidden closed proprietary standard that no one knows about thus no one can code anything without figuring out how to reverse engineer the process. Ask some people nicely for the feature and you might get it. Only reason it's not there now is because it requires....uggg effort.

Haali isn't exactly proprietary either, if you ask him nicely he will also show you things.

Just to make it clear, I don't think any one here believes that this feature is proprietary or coded to one platform. We're well aware that it's documented and only unavailable on our platforms because it simply hasn't been implemented yet. But for practical purposes, it's single platform at the moment (my hypothetical about something only playing properly on Linux was similarly oriented), meaning that releasing media in the format is kind of putting the cart ahead of the horse. HOWEVER, we're also aware that it's a useful feature and that since it's gone so long unimplemented elsewhere that some releases utilizing the feature now are a good thing in terms of helping speed development along.

I don't think we've been ambiguous or misleading in our posts, though. I think you'll find that's what we've actually said in our posts. But it's OK, we're used to prejudiced Windows users not paying attention.

Originally Posted by WanderingKnight

I've been talking to the mplayer guys at their IRC channel. They said none of the core developers is working on that feature at the moment, and that it's a lot of work, since there are a lot of potential security issues (accessing files behind the user's back), but that obviously it's a feature in the to-do list. In fact, they already implemented something similar with mov files, so it's not unlikely for this feature to arrive soon.

This quote does not give me too much hope, though:

14:09 < reimar> or to cut it short: I can understand why they did it and it may be the best that can be done, but the developer
                in me considers this just a horrible mis-feature which leads to very low motivation to do anything about it.

Thanks for checking into it with them!

It's really good to know that they're aware of it. I get the feeling that they just recently made it a priority and had previously hoped that the issue would simply never come up.

Now the only question is how long it will take to make it to a release version. I'm not so averted to compiling from subversion on Linux, but on OS X it's a pain and I'd rather use a pre-built official release.