I pretty much agree to anything here

but not entirely with the part: "player make use of the MMOS2 Codec wrapper", rather that it (the player) make use of mmos2 that in turn make use of the engine and wrapper when needed.
2 bounties are fine with me... but with a couple of requirements, that the design of the engine + wrapper will be in line with NOM and the forthcoming design decision for eCS regarding multimedia support and that the person that make the final decision, I don't know who that may be, but (s)he should have a strong say in this.
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Ahh, yes, I prefer native solutions, but some aren't possible yet, while we may see others quite soon. What I had in mind though was to snatch the good ideas and work currently available in WarpVision/KMP/MPlayer etc. and suggest something that would be more OS/2-like to the player developer and end user.
Current player situation
WarpVision play alot of video formats, even live stream over the net (yes I've used it to watch streaming TV) but is a bit unstable and doesn't play MP3 audio in movies very well.
KMP and MPlayer are both quite stable but lack more sophisticated windows to control them
PM123 player (MP3 and OGG audio) look very polished and work well, are stable and mature, would be nice to get some of that into a system wide player. Doesn't use mmos2 codecs either though :-<
Codec view
E.g. the way WarpVision does it now (if I'm correct) is to load Win32 codecs and run them, and those codecs use a small subset (I hope) of ODIN (Wine) calls. To get it "now" we need a wrapper and engine that does those things without the need of odin installed. The Wrapper does the "pretending" and translation parts, while the engine may provide mmos2 integration to the system and services like streaming.
MMOS2 view
The engine should extend current mmos2 so that all codecs (native and non native) appear as regular OS/2 codecs to mmos2 and the app/player/game/etc. that request to display/view/play a file.
mvh / Wkr / MfG
//Jan-Erik