[gentoo-dev] Last rites for media-video/helixplayer

[gentoo-dev] Last rites for media-video/helixplayer

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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After realplayer the last week, also helixplayer is pending removal from the 
tree.

HelixPlayer, opensource player developed by Real and somewhat similar to 
RealPlayer has a bad history of security vulnerabilities and it's still 
vulnerable to a security issue (1.0.6 is out but still missing an ebuild).
As the maintainership of this package is difficult, and the package by itself 
is a bit of a mess (for example it does only build fine on x86, no way it can 
work on amd64 or other platforms AFAICS), I've masked it and it's pending 
removal in 24h.

As the release of 2.0 version is imminent [1], and that version *might* work 
better on non-x86 arches, the media-video herd reserve the possibility of a 
return when that version is released (hopefully with less security concerns).

If someone wants to join the herd for maintaining this package, is absolutely 
welcome. Knowing the past problems, if someone wants, it's also invited to 
write a maintainer's guide (similar to xine's[2]) so that if it's going to 
leave the team someone else will know how to treat it.

[1] https://player.helixcommunity.org/2005/dev/plans.html
[2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/video/xine.xml
-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/ALT lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Last rites for media-video/helixplayer

[Henrik Brix Andersen]

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On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 08:29:03PM +0100, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote:
> After realplayer the last week, also helixplayer is pending removal from the 
> tree.

Please make a habit of always supplying a list of
alternates/replacements when writing a "last rites" email - saves us
someone having to ask:

What replaces it?

Regards,
Brix
-- 
Henrik Brix Andersen <brix@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Metadistribution | Mobile computing herd

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Last rites for media-video/helixplayer

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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On Monday 21 November 2005 21:15, Henrik Brix Andersen wrote:
> Please make a habit of always supplying a list of
> alternates/replacements when writing a "last rites" email - saves us
> someone having to ask:
Sorry, too used to know the media-video category by heart :|

> What replaces it?
HelixPlayer is a simple player for Ogg Theora/Ogg Vorbis files, so you can 
find at least three better replacements: media-video/vlc, xine and its 
frontends and media-video/mplayer .
They might not be drop-in replacements, but it's not like helixplayer does 
anything more for now.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/ALT lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Last rites for media-video/helixplayer

[Edward Catmur]

On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 21:43 +0100, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote:
> On Monday 21 November 2005 21:15, Henrik Brix Andersen wrote:
> > Please make a habit of always supplying a list of
> > alternates/replacements when writing a "last rites" email - saves us
> > someone having to ask:
> Sorry, too used to know the media-video category by heart :|
> 
> > What replaces it?
> HelixPlayer is a simple player for Ogg Theora/Ogg Vorbis files, so you can 
> find at least three better replacements: media-video/vlc, xine and its 
> frontends and media-video/mplayer .
> They might not be drop-in replacements, but it's not like helixplayer does 
> anything more for now.

helixplayer handles some of the RealMedia transports and codecs better
than any of the above; but for that you can use realplayer-10.0.6, which
is the same codebase as helixplayer and has extra non-Free codecs - it's
non-Free, but works on amd64 and x86, and anyone wanting to hack on the
realplayer/helixplayer codebase will be using helixplayer pre2 cvs
anyway.

Ed Catmur

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