Why should mpegplayer plugin go away ?

[JnO]

Hello everybody,
 
This is my first post on the Rockbox forum, and first of all, I would like to thank all the devs and the community for all the work done, which I appreciate a lot. This has allowed me to use an Ipod nano 2g, then several Fuze+ during many, many hours of great music listening, as well as FM radio, and sometimes even playing some of the games implemented via plugins (yes, I reached 2048 on the the Fuze+ ).

I'm posting today because I just saw that the mpegplayer plugin is being removed from Rockbox.

I'm quite surprised about this, since IMHO this plugin is not so pointless as the author of the commit seems to think... Is there really a good reason for making this plugin disappear ? I still appreciate watching some video clips I copied on the little music player, as well as (trying to) play Doom or Another World...

Of course, I would prefer some sort of mp4 player, but currently the mpegplayer is the only video player we have on Rockbox...

[Bilgus]

really what is the use case of the plugin on such a tiny screen besides the novelty
I see that removing the plugin frees up around 1-3k out of the main
binary which leaves room for other possibly more desirable features

[Frankenpod]

I think I used it once.  I converted a (live music) VCD to a suitable size format file to play on there.  But quickly decided it just wasn't worth the battery-usage to watch tiny-screen videos on the ipod so never used it again.

Though any argument against the mpeg player could surely also be made against many of the games and other plug-ins, no?

[amachronic]

The removal was proposed by speachy a year ago and there wasn't much of a reaction. Sometimes it's necessary to just do stuff that might cause a problem and see if anyone complains, because it's often really hard to get feedback on patches in advance. Removing mpegplayer is another one of these cases.

As I see it, the main problem with mpegplayer (aside from it being overtly "useless" by modern standards) is the lack of maintenance. It's only seen around 50 commits in the past 11 years and those are all just to keep it up to date with changes happening in the rest of Rockbox. So mpegplayer has seen no significant patches for over a decade. libmpeg2, which mpegplayer is based on, is dead upstream since 2008.

So I'm in favor of removing mpegplayer. However, I'm not opposed to keeping it around until it bitrots or becomes an actual maintenance hassle, not just a potential hassle -- and if some people are still getting use out of it, it's not difficult to add it back.

[__builtin]

I'm in favor of adding it back - people use it, and people have complained.

As I see it, the main problem with mpegplayer (aside from it being overtly "useless" by modern standards) is the lack of maintenance. It's only seen around 50 commits in the past 11 years and those are all just to keep it up to date with changes happening in the rest of Rockbox. So mpegplayer has seen no significant patches for over a decade. libmpeg2, which mpegplayer is based on, is dead upstream since 2008.

I don't think lack of maintenance alone is a good reason to remove something. mpegplayer is (was?) in a good enough state to do what it was intended to do. In a sense, Rockbox code exists in a vacuum - we don't have to worry about security vulnerabilities or keeping up with networking standards - so lacking functional updates isn't uncommon. I don't think anybody's touched the database code in years, and most plugins haven't seen any major updates since they were initially added.

[Milardo]

It's a nice feature to have, just like any of the other plugins

[JnO]

I see that mpegplayer is now back in daily builds. Thanks for having rolled back !