Re: MWN #2

Alex Beregszaszi writes:
 > mostly done!
 > Please fix my typos, english-bugs, ... and finally translate it!

Here you are:

Oh, well, just saw that you already posted it, but an updated version
should not make a big difference, so please publish it.

Diego


MPlayer Weekly News #2 - December 10th, 2002
============================================

Here's the long-awaited second issue!
It was planned to release it on Sunday (8th Dec), but sadly MPlayerHQ.hu
was down and I haven't had enough time to write it.

I want to thank you for the tons of replies I got (mostly questions
and translations).

1, MPlayerHQ.hu was down for a day
    On Sunday the router of our Internet provider crashed. No, our server
    was working nice, so it can handle all the traffic. I've seen many users
    reporting that the server can't handle all that much traffic.
    Please do not try to send such mails to the mailing lists, as we knew
    the problem in the first second.
    Anyway, it's nice to see that you care about us!

2, Server hosting needed!
    As you can see in the 1st point, we have some trouble with the network.
    So if you can provide some help in hosting our midi-tower based server,
    please contact us!
    Also it shouldn't cost us money and a good international connection
    (>= 1mbit) is appreciated (and needed)!

3, New MPlayer (pre)release is out!
    As you should have noticed the new package got the -rc1 version tag appended.
    Yes, we're going to release the final 0.90 (or 1.0?) soon. After that
    a new chapter will begin in the history of our beloved player.
    It can be downloaded from the homepage or the mirrors!
    (Mirrors: www2 or www3.mplayerhq.hu)

4, RPM packages released.
    Dominik Mierzejewski was very fast in releasing the RPM package of version
    0.90-rc1.
    Get it from http://www.piorunek.pl/~dominik/linux/pkgs/mplayer/ or from
    one of the following mirrors:
    http://mirrors.sctpc.com/dominik/linux/pkgs/mplayer/
    http://ftp.falsehope.com/home/rathann/mplayer/
    (both are located in the USA)

5, New mailing lists
    Two mailing lists have been created in the meantime, MPlayer-MWN and
    MPlayer-announce. The announce list, as it's name states, will be used
    only for announcing new features, releases and MWNs. It's read-only
    and the replies should go only to the -users list.
    Many of you have already subscribed to it and to -MWN too. Please note
    that the later one is only for the MWN editors and translators.

6, NEWS gateway to the mailing lists
    There were again questions about why we are using the old mailing list
    way and why we aren't using a news-server instead.
    The answer is: It's good and working. But here's good news for those of
    you, who don't like this type of forum: there's a news-server hosting our
    lists, too! It's name is GMANE (http://www.gmane.org), and it is a 
    bidirectional mailing list-news gateway (this means that it's fully
    functional).

    Most of the bigger lists are available there:
	gmane.comp.video.mplayer.devel		= [email protected]
	gmane.comp.video.mplayer.user		= [email protected]
	gmane.comp.video.mplayer.user.dvb	= [email protected]
	gmane.comp.video.mplayer.user.matrox	= [email protected]
	(gmane.comp.video.mplayer.weekly-news	= [email protected])

7, New feature
    It's finally there! Arpi has committed a new way of detecting
    streams (video, audio, ...) in the QuickTime demuxer. Now it selects
    the bigger streams automatically.

    It prints a line, which looks like this:
    MOV: best streams: A: #1 (295 samples)  V: #0 (3543 samples)
    or this:
    MOV: best streams: A: #2 (926 samples)  V: #1 (11552 samples)

    We don't want to see more bug reports about the Two Towers trailer! It's
    just annoying!

8, QuickTime efforts
    Yes, there are still improvements in that code!
    Now the extra dlls (qtextras.tar.bz2) are supported out-of-the-box too!
    And the low-bitrate QDMC decoding is fixed! Visit the codecs page for
    the updated tarballs!

9, New pages on the site
    The codecs page has moved to http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/
    which has an extra advantage: it is mirrored!
    There's also a new directory that collects the font packs distributed with
    the player: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/fonts/
    Finally, the home of MWN has moved to: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/mwn/

10, Wishlist
    Diego Biurrun finally collected the wishes!
    If you have a feature request, please read the current wishlist carefully
    and do not request features that were already added.

    The wishlist can be found in the CVS repository: main/DOCS/tech/wishlist

11, Efforts in other projects of the open source media processing scene:
    FFmpeg with clustering support

    Yes, it works, really! A guy, named Mans Rullgard has done it (who is 
    also working in MPlayerXP :) It isn't available yet, but it sounds very
    promising.

    Just some raw measurements:
    "# CPUs  Relative speedup
    1       1
    2       1.8
    3       2.5
    4       3.2
    5       3.8

    I used 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 single-CPU machines with 100 Mbit/s NICs.
    The network is rather busy and the machines were most likely in use
    (they belong to the university)."

    For more information visit the homepage of the FFmpeg Project at
    http://www.ffmpeg.org/ or http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/

    Okay, this doesn't mean any advantages in MEncoder, but never mind that
    every time we use MPlayer we have to thank the FFmpeg developers.
    They brought the libavcodec library to us, which is heavily used in
    open source media players.

12, Weekly fun
    Thanks for the many replies to Gabucino regarding his SCSI problems.
    He was very angry at me for publishing that, and said that the real
    problem is that his old device needs terminators and such. So now he
    needs them. Feel free to donate!:)

--
Impressum:
    Homepage: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/mwn/
    Authors: Alex Beregszaszi <[email protected]> and
	     Istvan Sebestyen <[email protected]>
    Additional corrections by onetom and szabszi