While being able to play videos on a framebuffer device would be nice,
I didn't need it, and couldn't even test it (buggy nvidia binary
drivers that disable framebuffers, buggy DirectFB that crashes when
using the X11 backend). It's just dead weight, get rid of it.
vo_directx was very horrible, and by today it's mostly useless. I didn't
remove it, because there was that-guy who told me in amazement how
awesome mplayer was, because it was the only video player fast enough
for fast playback on his system when using vo_directx. Sorry, that-guy.
Since slave mode is not planned to be kept, this VO is useless and I'm
removing it.
This VO was useful for OSX GUIs. Since in cocoa you can't embed views in
windows from other processes, this VO was writing to a sharedbuffer with
mmap. The OSX GUIs would then read from the buffer and render the image
with an external renderer.
If in the future we will want to support GUIs we will need to reasearch the
IOSurface framework. This allows to share kernel managed image data
across processes and integrates well with OpenGL.
The documentation is mostly taken from the help text embedded in the
code of each output driver.
vo_v4l2 and ao_v4l2 have been removed.
Minor modifications to vo_xv, vo_directx and vo_gl.
This was disabled by default, and could be enabled with -dr. It was
disabled by default because it was buggy: there were issues with OSD
corruption.
It wasn't entirely sane for OpenGL based VOs either. OpenGL can chose
to drop mapped pixel buffer objects, requiring the application to map
and fill the buffer again. But there was no mechanism in mplayer to
fill the lost buffer again. (It seems this rarely happened in practice,
though.)
On the other side, users liked the --dr flag, because it promised them
more speed. I'm not sure if it actually helped with speed, but it's
unlikely it had any real advantages on modern systems.
In order to evade the --dr cargo culting in mplayer config files, it's
best to get rid of it.
About a year ago, ubitux converted most of the old manpage from the
hard to maintain nroff format to reStructuredText. This was not merged
back into the master repository immediately. The argument was that the
new manpage still required work to be done. However, progress was very
slow. Even worse: the old manpage wasn't updated, because it was
scheduled for deletion, and updating it would have meant useless work.
Now the situation is that the new manpage still isn't finished, and the
old manpage is grossly out of sync with the player. This is not helpful
for users. Additionally, keeping the new manpage in a separate branch,
while the normal development repository for code had the old manpage,
was very inconvenient, because you couldn't just update the
documentation in the same commit as the code.
Even though the new manpage isn't finished yet, merging it now seems to
be the best course of action. Squash-merge the manpage development
branch [1], revision e89f5dd3f2, which branches from the mplayer2
master branch after revision 159102e0cb.
Committers:
* Clément Bœsch <ubitux@gmail.com> (Initial conversion to RST.)
* Uoti Urpala <uau@mplayer2.org> (Many updates.)
* Myself (Minor edits.)
Most text of the manpage has been directly taken from the old manpage,
because this is a conversion, not a complete rewrite.
[1] http://git.mplayer2.org/uau/mplayer2.git/log/?h=man
cantabile
wm4
Stefano Pigozzi