severity 395252 important thanks hi
I am downgrading severity of this bug, for the sake of including MPlayer in the Etch release. Before jumping on horses, please read the motivation. -- Some time ago, I proposed some options for solving this bug. First option [O]: compile MPlayer using FFmpeg as is currently shipped in Debian. I tried this, and it fails: FFmpeg has had much development , and this development is all used inside MPlayer; so compilation fails (in too many places to make this feasible ) . Second option [N]: prepare new FFmpeg Debian packages, and link MPlayer to that. Unfortunately, I tried to contact Sam many many times on this, but he was too busy. So eventually I actually did that myself (as reported in http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=395252;msg=152 ) At that time, I compiled libxine , and tested a dynamic version of MPlayer and totem-xine and xine-ui (all using this new FFmpeg 0.svn6767) on some files; it all worked surprisingly well. The problem is that, I could then not proceed further: - I did not want to upload into unstable, since we were near freeze , and the above is a major lib upgrade - I did not test it on all archs (I see from Sam's logs and patches that ffmpeg did fail on arm in the past ; but many of Sam's patch do not apply to the newer ffmpeg) - my idea was to upload my work in experimental, to see if it would be autobuilt correctly, and to ask for wider testing in d-devel; but Sam did not answer me when I asked permission I should also recall that dynamic linking of MPlayer to FFmpeg has currently some drawbacks: MPlayer is slower; and some features of MPlayer are disabled; so, a lot more work would be needed to really offer a full featured dynamically linked MPlayer. Now, freeze has come, so there is no more time to do any of the above. -- Please do not upgrade the severity of this bug again; you can see that I honestly tried to address it. Moreover, it took me almost 5 years to get MPlayer into Debian, I would really hate to see it out of Etch. thanks, a.
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