An interview with RVM, developer of Smplayer

Last week I did a review of the excellent media player for Linux and Windows Smplayer. This week the developer behind this great Mplayer front-end granted me an email interview:

TNM: Where did the idea of creating Smplayer come from?

RVM: I'm a linux user and I have always used mplayer to play videos, and I was very happy with it. But sometimes, when I had to use Windows I also wanted to use mplayer, but using a command line application on Windows is really hard. Also some people asked me to recommend them a video player for their Windows machines and I would have liked to recommend mplayer but the front-ends available at that moment were very simple (for example I missed options to configure the subtitles). It was a little disappointing.

So it was then when I started to think about the possibility to develop my own front-end.

I knew a little bit about the Qt libraries, so I began to implement smplayer on linux using that toolkit.

TNM: Why did you choose to use Mplayer as your back-end rather than make you own player based on FFMPEG?

The initial idea was always to create a front-end for mplayer.

TNM: How are your relations with the Mplayer team, do you perceive each other as competitor?

Not at all. I don't think the mplayer team can think on the front-ends as
competitors.

Sometimes during the development of some feature I find some problems or bugs in mplayer, which I report to the mplayer mailing list and usually the mplayer developers are so kind to fix the issues very fast.

TNM: Why is there no OSX version, is it just because you don't have access to a Mac or is there something else?

Yes, that's it. I don't have access to any Mac so I can't provide packages for it. Anyway other people managed to compile smplayer on it, but unfortunately there's the problem that the video is not embedded into the smplayer window, because it seems the mplayer option -wid doesn't work on Mac OSX .

TNM: Any new Smplayer features in your plans?

Currently I'm adding support for TV (mainly dvb-t). This is a feature that will only work on linux, because as far as I know mplayer doesn't have support for dvb on Windows yet.

TNM: Thank you a lot for this interview!