A correspondent who understandably wishes to remain anonymous is perhaps the first to come forth and point out what others have undoubtedly noticed:
Those naughty websites have a knack for posting samples with lots of errors … Maybe it would be easier to have a “clip bin” that’s anonymous, where you can submit clips ..that break the library.
We already do have the anonymous FTP at mplayerhq.hu for uploading samples. IP addresses are logged somewhere, but big deal. The bigger issue is that you sort of need to ping a development list somewhere in order to make them aware of the problem.
If you are determined enough, you can always go through anonymous proxy services to upload the sample and then use anonymous remailers or email services to alert the list or someone associated with the list.
Just part of our… umm… commitment to quality.
Mr. Anonymous mentions that the second part could be avoided by having an automated script that checks for new material in the upload directory and logs the information somewhere. I’ll file that away for when I finally get the autobuild/test system operational.
I agree with this. I found all kind of porn clips that fails with mplayer, even crashing or not playing correctly. I find saying this on IRC or a mailing list a lot shameful, specially if that porn stuff can be very alternative (gay, bisex, shemale, fucking with animals…). Remember internet is for porn, and if you want to people use Linux and other open-source Unix-like OSes you must make them do the same stuff on their winbugs boxes.
I think ALL videos must be made playable on mplayer, even if it’s about a giant black guy fucking a bunch of tiny white guys with his very oversice penis in an extreme way. I’m sure there are mplayer users with all kinds of sexual preferences out there.
And remember those bugs from shameful movies can affect to some of your liked average ones.
My suggestion is an anonymous form where you put the URL or upload the movie (not bigger than X mb), the mplayer version, operating system version, machine (or the uname thingie), computer (arch, CPU, memory, graphics card) and other needed stuff.
I’m sure this is already thinked, but I wanted to say it.
Thanks for voicing your support of the idea. I’m going to have to mention all this when I do my presentation on the future of FFmpeg at LinuxTag 2007 in a few weeks.