The Mplayer graphical user interface that I've seen/use also comes across as less-than user-friendly. When I first tried mplayer I thought it didn't work, when in fact I simply wasn't understanding how to use it. Pity, because, it is such a great program. Indeed, I always use mplayer in preference to gxine - dvd playback in gxine never works well for me, whereas with mplayer it works flawlessly/stutterless even on my old Celeron 400MHz Puppy 2.17.1 machine (with a suitable cache). Admittedly I always just play the full dvd movie on it and don't care about whether or not it provides a good functionality for accessing different parts of the dvd.Lobster wrote:What exactly is the attraction of gxine? Is it smaller? Theoretically better? This has come again and again, people have problems with gxine, they use mplayer and are happy . . .
Mind you, vlc works perfectly under win2000pro (oops) on the same machine too... Much though we may criticise Microsoft, I must say I think W98SE and win2000pro and excellent in their own ways (look how long ago they were produced...). But at least we now have the likes of Puppy Linux which blows both of them away when it comes to installation/size, and more than that: it IS Linux.
One thing I'd dearly like to see is the official Puppy distribution being released in a different form:
as a BareBones Puppy plus addon (sfs or whatever) to give its overall functionality. Personally (being on dialup, and for other reasons) I'm tired of the plethora of Puppy isos; I'd rather see a plethora of addons for a BareBones Puppy (each creating a different user/community-created Puppy flavour). Indeed, one of the things I love about the existing Puppy Linux is that it can be turned into a small development system simply by downloading an addon dev sfs. So why not produce the whole distribution in that terrific form? Dotpets don't do that job - at least not with frugal distributions, because they bloat the pupsave file (leaving any overwritten stuff still in the pupsave and thus, potentially, in RAM).