Re: [xine-devel] 1.0 release

[Harm v. d. H. <ha...@et...>]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2001 at 05:57:17PM +0000, Rich Wareham wrote:
> I agree _but_ xine is not just a Linux DVD player. It is a *nix media playing 
> engine. It does a lot more than just play DVDs. I agree that _dvdnav_ should 
> become far more stable before reaching 1.0 but xine, as a playing engine, 
> need not wait for the (lets face it un-official) dvdnav facility to catch up.

Yes. But in this case the 1.0 announcement should say xine is a "*nix media
playing engine" and mention that full dvd support is coming but not here
yet.

What I'm getting at is, the 1.0 announcement shouldn't make people think
that there's finally a full-featured dvd player for linux if dvdnav then
still isn't finished. Those people will then be disappointed and may not
return when dvdnav 1.0 is done...

Personally, I'd like to wait with a big announcement (like trying to get a
slashdot story) until dvd support is really solid. So I favour releasing xine
1.0 when it's done, but keeping it relatively quiet until dvd support is
completed.

> I liken it to KDE and KOffice being seperate so that the more mature KDE does
> not have to accept the instability of the less-mature KOffice or wait for it
> to catch up.

I think this analogy is flawed; I estimate that the far majority of people
who'll want to watch video content on their pc will have that content in the
form of dvd, not qt, avi or pure mpeg. This is unlike the KDE situation, where
most people find KDE useful even without a working KOffice.  

Of course, if pirated movie content on the internet really takes off, the
situation might be reversed with .avi as main content format :-)

Harm