mplayer

Created Sunday 22/7/2007

Mplayer is an image and audio processing library and application. The mplayer library uses mencoder and a bunch of codecs for image and audio manipulation. The video player mplayer and the gui gmplayer are bundled in with the source. The development effort and downloads for mplayer are at www.mplayerhq.hu

Todo: Refactor dvd section 9.B (especially 9.B.2 and 9.B.3) into here

1. mplayer from svn

To compile mplayer from the subversion repository, check out the trunk version of the source, install dependent libaries and run the configure script. The configure script will autodetect most drivers that have headers installed on the local system. However, the gui and the open gl options should be enabled if mplayer is to be run in gui mode. The following outline the required compilation steps:

• Check out from source —▶ svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
• Configure driver support and optional features —▶ configure --enable-gui --enable-gl
• Compile source —▶ make
• Install source, default is /usr/local/bin, change with configure's --prefix option —▶ make install
• All done!

2. MPlayer plugin

The mplayerplug-in, available as rpm from Livna, is a browser plugin for firefox (actually any mozilla browser) which allows various Audio/Visual files and codecs to be played directly from within the browser. More recently (March 2008), the mplayerplugin-in has been replaced with gecko-mediaplayer, which does have quite the same 64-bit issues that mplayerplug-in suffered from.

If using the mplayerplug-in, then it is useful to note that the plugin will not work with 64-bit firefox. If using the 32-bit version, then be sure to create symlinks to all the mplayer libaries (.so files) and components (.xpt files) that exist for each of the codecs supported by the plugin. The following is a list of rpm content for mplayerplug-in:

• mplayerplug-in - Generic A/V codecs
• mplayerplug-in-dvx - DIVX and XVID codecs
• mplayerplug-in-qt - Apple Quick Time codec
• mplayerplug-in-rm - Real Media (.ram .rm) codec
• mplayerplug-in-wmp - Windows Media Player

Note: The component files (.xpt) are installed to /usr/lib/mozilla/components and the library files (.so) to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. Symlinks should be created in the mozilla/firefox plugin directory (see firefox #10 for locations) for all the .so and .xpt files.

Tip: The mplayerplug-in is now replaced with gecko-mediaplayer

Stuart Moorfoot © 22 July 2007 foo@bund.com.au