Mplayer Revisited

Joe Barr writes "It's been two years since I first wrote about Mplayer. Maybe the fury of the developers/community reaction to the fact that I dared to criticize them for their treatment of users kept me away. Whatever. Now Mplayer has a pre1 version of release 1.0 out there and it's time for another look." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.

Comments

the text

[Anonymous Coward]

Mplayer revisited

Friday October 03, 2003 - [ 06:00 AM GMT ]
Topic - Free Software

- by Joe Barr -
It's been almost two years since I wrote about Mplayer, an open source movie player for Linux and other platforms. Rereading that story today, I see I was wrong when I predicted that Mplayer's popularity wouldn't last. It continues to rank as the most popular project on freshmeat.net. I recently downloaded pre-release 1 of Mplayer 1.0 to see how much things have changed, if at all, since then. What I found is that while some things have changed, others have not.

In December of 2001, Mplayer had the rep of playing more codecs than any other movie player for Linux. The list of codecs - both audio and video - that it supports today is quite impressive. And if you add the mplayerplug-in you can leverage Mplayer's repertoire and play the most popular video formats used online in Mozilla, Galeon, Netscape, and maybe Opera, too.

Mplayer also had the rep of being a tough install and of being even tougher on users - noobs or not - who were having problems with the install. In fact, I used a comment from a frustrated user posting on freshmeat.net for the title of my first article and called it "Mplayer: the project from hell." Let's start with the install issue first and save the other for last.

Buried deep in the Mplayer documentation - in the section on installation - are a few lines of text that make the process seem completely trivial. They read as follows:

Features:

* Decide if you need GUI. If you do, see the GUI section before compiling.
* If you want to install MEncoder (our great all-purpose encoder), see the MEncoder section.
* If you have a V4L compatible TV tuner card, and wish to watch/grab and encode movies with MPlayer, read the TV input section.
* There is a neat OSD Menu support ready to be used. Check the OSD Menu section.

Then build MPlayer: ./configure make make install

At this point, MPlayer is ready to use. The $PREFIX/etc/mplayer/codecs.conf file is needed only when you want to change its properties, as the main binary contains an internal copy of it.

Actually, there is a little more to it than that. And a lot of reading in those docs is highly recommended before you begin. Here's how I installed Mplayer from the pre-1 1.0 source code on Red Hat 9.0 running Ximian Desktop 2.

I began by going through the list of requirements and making sure that I had not just each app noted, but an acceptable release of each. Except for gcc, that is. I ignored the rants and held steady with gcc-3.2.2-5 shipped by Red Hat.

Then I was ready to download: I grabbed mplayer-1.0pre1 and the codecs I thought I needed plus a skin or two from the downloads page on the Mplayer site. I created an mplayer directory in my home directory, then used bunzip2 to decompress each of the downloads and then ran tar, which unpacked them and stowed them away in their own directories. For neatness, I created a separate tar directory and moved the tar files themselves there afterwards.

Then I entered the mplayer-1.0pre1 subdirectory tar had created and ran the configure script with the gui option: ./configure --enable-gui. The script ran, but it complained about not having found a Win32 codecs directory, among a long list (more than 50 items) of other things.

I had downloaded the Win32 codecs, but they were needed in a directory I didn't have. No problem. I changed to su, created a /usr/local/lib/codecs directory, and moved the win32codecs directory there. Then I ran the configure script again. This time there was no complaint about missing Win32 codecs.

Then I went through the configure.log and checked every one of the 50 items it had noted as deficient or missing. None of them were critical. Many didn't even apply to me as they were for different platforms completely. So I started make and took a break.

I came back about 15 minutes later and fo

Here it is, the full text

[jidar]

- by Joe Barr -
It's been almost two years since I wrote about Mplayer, an open source movie player for Linux and other platforms. Rereading that story today, I see I was wrong when I predicted that Mplayer's popularity wouldn't last. It continues to rank as the most popular project on freshmeat.net. I recently downloaded pre-release 1 of Mplayer 1.0 to see how much things have changed, if at all, since then. What I found is that while some things have changed, others have not.

In December of 2001, Mplayer had the rep of playing more codecs than any other movie player for Linux. The list of codecs - both audio and video - that it supports today is quite impressive. And if you add the mplayerplug-in you can leverage Mplayer's repertoire and play the most popular video formats used online in Mozilla, Galeon, Netscape, and maybe Opera, too.

Mplayer also had the rep of being a tough install and of being even tougher on users - noobs or not - who were having problems with the install. In fact, I used a comment from a frustrated user posting on freshmeat.net for the title of my first article and called it "Mplayer: the project from hell." Let's start with the install issue first and save the other for last.

Buried deep in the Mplayer documentation - in the section on installation - are a few lines of text that make the process seem completely trivial. They read as follows:

Features:

* Decide if you need GUI. If you do, see the GUI section before compiling.
* If you want to install MEncoder (our great all-purpose encoder), see the MEncoder section.
* If you have a V4L compatible TV tuner card, and wish to watch/grab and encode movies with MPlayer, read the TV input section.
* There is a neat OSD Menu support ready to be used. Check the OSD Menu section.

Then build MPlayer: ./configure make make install

At this point, MPlayer is ready to use. The $PREFIX/etc/mplayer/codecs.conf file is needed only when you want to change its properties, as the main binary contains an internal copy of it.

Actually, there is a little more to it than that. And a lot of reading in those docs is highly recommended before you begin. Here's how I installed Mplayer from the pre-1 1.0 source code on Red Hat 9.0 running Ximian Desktop 2.

I began by going through the list of requirements and making sure that I had not just each app noted, but an acceptable release of each. Except for gcc, that is. I ignored the rants and held steady with gcc-3.2.2-5 shipped by Red Hat.

Then I was ready to download: I grabbed mplayer-1.0pre1 and the codecs I thought I needed plus a skin or two from the downloads page on the Mplayer site. I created an mplayer directory in my home directory, then used bunzip2 to decompress each of the downloads and then ran tar, which unpacked them and stowed them away in their own directories. For neatness, I created a separate tar directory and moved the tar files themselves there afterwards.

Then I entered the mplayer-1.0pre1 subdirectory tar had created and ran the configure script with the gui option: ./configure --enable-gui. The script ran, but it complained about not having found a Win32 codecs directory, among a long list (more than 50 items) of other things.

I had downloaded the Win32 codecs, but they were needed in a directory I didn't have. No problem. I changed to su, created a /usr/local/lib/codecs directory, and moved the win32codecs directory there. Then I ran the configure script again. This time there was no complaint about missing Win32 codecs.

Then I went through the configure.log and checked every one of the 50 items it had noted as deficient or missing. None of them were critical. Many didn't even apply to me as they were for different platforms completely. So I started make and took a break.

I came back about 15 minutes later and found make had completed successfully. I ran make install as root, then exited to