The background is that I had started working on Voracious on and off in 2016. In early August 2018, I decided to develop it further. I mentioned this to CalculusAce and Vladz0r, and Vladz0r basically said "oh wow, Yoga is working on something super similar, you should talk to him".
So I reached out to Yoga (my first time talking to him), and it went like this:
I was excited to discuss features and implementation with someone working on a similar project. He said he had been working on his player for 3 days, and that it was halfway done. He was cagey about details, and said "When i release it you can look at the code and see how I did it", which I felt was weird because mine was already open source, out in the open, I just wanted to have a mutually beneficial sharing of ideas!
Several weeks later I had gotten Voracious to a good place, and I checked in with Yoga and see if his player was out. I was curious to compared what we built. We had this exchange:
Once again, at this point he had not released anything, and Voracious was released, free, open source. So when he says stuff like "are you going to steal every feature I release on my player?" it is extra baffling. Also his insistence that I need not build mine (which I already built) because his will do everything I want and be released very soon, was not borne out, as it sounds like he is just releasing a player now, two years later.
After this, I had an awkward video chat with Yoga and Matt, where Yoga was apologetic but asked me to do him the favor of keeping Voracious a secret, so that he could first release his player and charge people for it for a few months. I was disappointed that Matt supported Yoga in asking for this, but it was definitely driven by Yoga. I politely told them no. By this point I was honestly feeling "fuck this Yoga guy", but even in principle, why would I withhold a free product from potential users so that he can make some money?
Anyways, I don't know the details of the MIA situation but my experience with Yoga makes me distrust his account and intentions.
Good stuff. But honestly, the idea of using a standalone player to make Anki cards sounds a bit silly to me. You guys should focus on writing mpv add-ons instead. I realize that the technology wasn't there in 2018 but in a few months from now apparently mpv is going to receive a new scripting interface that should allow writing add-ons like https://github.com/pigoz/lat.