On their latest version they even mentioned that they now support .m2ts AVCHD files, and everyone who tried their AVCHD files they didn’t work. So much for testing.

Well, you hate the model until they don’t do what you demand. You see, slavery is gone where we happen to live, and Christmas is just once a year, so well, get used to how different people working in their free time get things done. You don’t have to like it, but you seem to make a sport out of stating every now and then how you detest the whole thing. I think we all got it by now.

Maybe we can lure the avidemux devs into adding a libquicktime backend.

Cheers
-Richard

And no, VLC is one of the fastest player I’ve played with. Although I’m a big fan of mplayer (and use it 95% of the time on my linux box) VLC is still the best to replace Windows Media and Quicktime (IMHO).

But in one thing we do agree, if we want to share our videos it’s important people use compatible encoders/decoders. And the reason Quicktime does not play Avidemux encoded h264 files is that the default options (some 8×8 transformations and P/B frame search) is not implemented by Quicktime (I read that in… can’t remember where, sorry!).

What you specifically don’t like is the development model where developers work just for fun, because they don’t get paid, and so they do what they want and they don’t do what they don’t want. If they develop an open source app or a closed source one is irrelevant. In fact, it would be much worse if it was closed source, since no one would be able to fix it on their own.

Yes, many open source projects use this model, but that’s just an unfortunate reality.

The essence of Open Source development model is that everyone can contribute to it and take advantage of it, being companies or individuals, professionals or amateurs. And when this model works, it’s unbeatable. The best example is the Linux Kernel, where many professionals from many companies contribute to it and all take advantage of it. Also many non professionals (students, aficionados,…) contribute to it and use it. And the result is the best general purpose kernel in the planet. To achieve something similar with closed source development model, you would need lots and lots and lots of money. But then Microsoft has even more money than that and they have a worse kernel, so it seems no amount of money can compete with the Open Source model.

So when you complain about what you are complaining in this post, I think you should better use a different term. Something like “amateur development model” or “for fun development model”. The fact that the project is also Open Source is not the root of the problem. It alleviates the problem a bit, in fact.

I don’t think the open source model is necessarily broken.
It would work better, though, if there was a simple way for users to say “I want this fixed and I’ll pay $x to anybody who fixes it.”
We’d then need some concept of trust or user rating.
Developers need a way to know how likely a certain user is to pay. Or one could create an organization to decide if a bug has been fixed or if a feature has been implemented.