Mandriva Introduces New Media Player

Today Denis Koryavov, lead interface developer at ROSA Labs, announced a new media player for ROSA/Mandriva. ROSA Media Player (ROMP) is a fork of MPlayer and SMPlayer with a sleek design and new features. Today a beta of 1.0 was made available to test and Koryavov says it's stable.

There have a been at least a couple of forks of MPlayer and friends over the years but the main reason ROSA wanted a fork of their own was the difficulty in getting any code accepted into upstream projects. Koryavov said this is due to ideology differences. Seems ROSA designers prefer a "pure choice" concept, which is the "possibility to allow our users to just see a video without taking the trouble with many features."

While folks are testing and reporting bugs for the new player, Koryavov asks for user feedback concerning features and functionality. However, some future plans are already simmering. These include:

● possibility to record video from the screen (like recordMyDesktop);
● possibility to strip the video by size;
● possibility to connect, download and play a video from some video services like Youtube;
● New interface (maybe on the QT Quick);

Packages are said to be in Cooker and Mandriva 2011 Main/backports repos, but they haven't propagated fully as of yet. I checked a few mirrors and didn't see it or the SRPM in any of them yet. There's no mention of the license as of yet either. But keep an eye on mirrors as this new app becomes available. More information and images can be found at the developer's blog post.