Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

As explained last time, the PHP script I wrote as a contribution to MPlayer’s website could not be accepted, and I was encouraged to rewrite it in pure BASH. That is indeed what I did, and I include the code for this new version below. In addition, it would be natural to give a link to the output of the script, hosted live on their server, assuming that such output did in fact exist. Unfortunately it does not, and will not, because even my new script was rejected, without so much as a “Thank you for your efforts” or “Sorry you went to so much trouble.” As such there is a bit of a story to tell, which I will do here.

My views on and dealings with MPlayer are becoming quite a saga, or at least a blog category. I now have something to report after emailing the webmaster@ address I found on their website, but (as perhaps I should have guessed given my previous criticism of the project) communicating with them turned out to be rather difficult. To start with, I never got an email in reply, and had to go into the their IRC channel to get a response, which may innocently be explained by a lack of clearly defined roles in the project. Also, I am prepared to admit that I am not without my own failings, for instance accepting, as this post will explain, that PHP was the wrong language to choose to write the Atomise script in. If I had checked a little harder into the project, like their SVN repository, I may have found the Makefile-based system they use to generate the website (as opposed to a system using files written in a web scripting language). I don’t think that this oversight on my part, however, is as unacceptable as the fact that the first reply I got in the #mplayer channel was a death threat.