Just read about this.
http://www.mplayer2.org/

Don't know if there is any interest in this during rc cycle

Is there any reason why they have forked off a new version of an actively maintained and well supported program? Why not just submit these changes and fixes upstream?

Reading their Changelog, it looks like they removed more useful functionality than what they added...

I don't think there will ever be any interest in mplayer2.

Maybe it's the RIAA/MPAA version.

http://www.mplayer2.org/comparison.html
WHAT STUPID DEVELOPERS! If they can do gapless playback, then they should obviously make it the immutable default setting.

mplayer's worst feature (its frustratingly terrible handling of DVD menus) isn't improved on (in fact they exclude libdvdnav entirely) and the rest seems like it would be better pushed upstream. I don't think there will be any desire for this to be included with Slackware any time soon...

They removed mencoder entirely ... hmm. I don't think I'll be using this. I know it's not perfect, but sometimes it's necessary.

just FYI, ffmpeg has been forked too.

Spring is coming.

This one looks different, and I think I will switch.

Is it a fork? Looks more like a renaming, or so they are saying. Cloned the website too...

See:
http://libav.org/about.html

Summary: They forked due to major squabble among devs and with the project leader, who refused to accept numerous code changes.

This tree was available for a long time now. If i remember correctly, it originally started as a git mirror of the svn tree and Mr. Urpala included some patches that he considered necessary but the devs didn't want them in the official tree.

The justification for the removal was that mencoder didn't see any development in a long time. I was angry too when mencoder was removed from the -git tree because mencoder has easier syntax than ffmpeg and so compiled the svn tree again. It was some days ago i noticed that every video i converted using mencoder in the last 2 months is wrong. Mencoder didn't honour my bitrate and who knows what other is wrong.
As you see the third episode has half the size it should have. Both were created using the same script. Also, mencoder has some problems with dts audio (it drops frames) and other problems that ffmpeg doesn't have. Alas, ffmpeg has more difficult syntax.

I don't depreciate the work of the mencoder devs of course. I have used it more than i have used ls and i thank them for giving us such a great program

Well, for DVD menus, and video in general, I've been happy with gnome-mplayer. It uses mplayer as its back end and is a much better GUI (for GTK) than gmplayer. Along with that, gecko-mediaplayer plugin kicks ass (mplayer-plugin sucks). I don't see what mplayer expects to add other than some trivial tweaks. I use Nvidia vdpau and haven't noticed their complaints (ie on a 40inch LCD 1080p screen).

As for libav, kind of sounds like another power play like XFREE86 v. X.Org and OpenOffice v. LibreOffice. Hopefully we get a better project or they will just kiss, make up and merge.

As an end user, I am not so much interested in the prima donna squabbles among devs, just in solid, efficient code. And by solid I mean old school solid: 6502/8080/Z80 with 64KB RAM.

Damn kids! Get off my lawn...er...CODE!

My Apple-II only had 48K. Why would anyone need any more than that?