One of my biggest beefs about media players (if you haven’t noticed yet) is the lack of support for my favorite media wrapper, Matroska. If you don’t know what that is, just ask me next time I’m around, and watch me shift into extreme-fanboyism explanation mode. Simply put, though, its similar in concept to AVI, but far superior in features.
My favorite part of it is you can have chapters in any Matroska file just like you can in an DVD. The reason I want something like that so badly is for two reasons. One is that once I have a feature in one format, I’ll go stir crazy until I have it another. The second one is that the chances of me sitting through one movie in an entire sitting are pretty low. My threshold is at about an hour, max.
So, if I leave and come back often … I want to be able to *quickly* get to where I left off. Either by resume playback completely (I’m working on that one) or skipping to the next chapter. No, I don’t want to skip ahead 5 seconds / minutes / hours. I want to skip to the next chapter.
My whole point of this is that it finally occurred to me to actually ask for this feature on the MPlayer mailing list instead of constantly complaining that it didn’t have it. Well, much to my surprise, someone much smarter than me posted a patch just a few hours later, and to make a long story short … it works great. 😀
I’m hoping it gets included into the main program soon. That would be really cool. I’m still just really stoked that my most wished-for mplayer feature got added. Not to mention that it was really easy just to ask for it. 🙂 I really should try out this strange thing called “communication” some more.