BMP, or Beep Media Player, is a compact media player that was originally
forked from XMMS with the goal of porting XMMS to GTK2 and make use of
more modern desktop standards. The original XMMS is based on GTK 1.2,
which is now deprecated for roughly 4 years, and was deprecated at the
time of the fork for approximately 2 years. This, and the fact that the
developers were developing XMMS under a mostly cathedral-style model led
M. Derezynski to fork BMP from XMMS.  The original name of the application
was "Beep", but since a program for the PC speaker for creating beep
sounds called "beep" already existed, the project was renamed to "Beep
Media Player" by adding the attributive "Media Player". This name seems
rather awkward now, since in some way it suggests that the player is meant
to play some kind of "beep media", which of course doesn't exist. Because
of that it was mostly agreed that the official name is now "BMP", which
doesn't neccesarily stand for anything (see for popular examples of
such kinds of naming changes for example the DVD entry in Wikipedia).

• Vitaly Lipatov

• bmpx
• bmpx-devel