[Howto] Successfully install the svn MPlayer under Hardy Heron

[andrew.46]

Hi gardara,

Is there a special reason why you choose gmplayer rather than smplayer?
In my option, smplayer is much nicer...

I agree. This guide was originally written over a year ago and at that time I wanted to demonstrate how to install the 'complete' MPlayer package. Now I am a little more experienced and have read the mplayer-users list for some time I realise that this goal was perhaps a little foolish and even misconceived.

Maby adding instructions of getting svn smplayer into the guide is a good idea?
It's actually not hard, just skip the skin and "enable gui" steps and then catch smplayer svn and compile it.

I do not intend adding to this guide after the beta release of Jaunty and in fact at that time I will write a new guide that omits skin and gmplayer completely and adds in the smplayer. I had not really considered using the svn smplayer but rather the repository version. That would of course not stop anyone who wanted to write a guide for compiling the svn smplayer .

All the best,

Andrew

[pedja_portugalac]

Andrew Thank You very much.

Yesterday I didn't sleep much because of problems installing svn mplayer from source. This morning following your howto, on interpid, I installed it in 30 minutes and now I have the latest mplayer. This is the best howto I have found about svn mplayer compilation and it should be in official media page.

Thanks ones again and Mary Christmas to You

[andrew.46]

Hi pedja,

Thanks for your kind post,

Yesterday I didn't sleep much because of problems installing svn mplayer from source. This morning following your howto, on interpid, I installed it in 30 minutes and now I have the latest mplayer. This is the best howto I have found about svn mplayer compilation and it should be in official media page.

Thanks again! The guide has kept me busy for a year or so now and I am looking forward to writing a brand new version for Jaunty when it comes. This guide will however never make it to 'official' status as it installs codecs that are not officially sanctioned by Ubuntu as well as installing libdvdcss which is not officially recognised by Ubuntu. Such a guide as mine definitely has a place but perhaps not an official place .

Thanks ones again and Mary Christmas to You

And a Merry Christmas or you and your family as well, and best wishes for the New Year.

All the best,

Andrew

[andrew.46]

Hi,

I have put a new version of the guide in place for Intrepid Ibex:

[Howto] Install the svn Mplayer under Intrepid Ibex
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1024592

The new guide is considerably improved on the current effort. It integrates all the installed software under the package management system, utilises the Medibuntu Repository for the first time, deals with manually installing the newest Live555 libraries and has abandoned the gmplayer for SMPlayer.

Look forward to seeing you there !!

All the best,

Andrew Strong

[napauleon]

First of all: a great guide for installing mplayer from svn

The only thing i cant get my head around is lirc support. When using mplayer from the package tree, lirc works fine.

However i needed some extra's for my 1080p video's (coreavc), which runs very nice now. However i can't get lirc to work with the latest svn release of mplayer (dev-SVN-r28274-4.2.4).

when I run ./configure it shows that it found a positive lookup for --enable-lirc (not for --enable-lircc) and it compiles fine when running make.
However lirc is not loaded when running mplayer. I've got all the necessary lirc packages installed i guess.

Any ideas on getting lirc to work with the svn release of mplayer?

[andrew.46]

Hi napauleon,

[...]when I run ./configure it shows that it found a positive lookup for --enable-lirc (not for --enable-lircc) and it compiles fine when running make. However lirc is not loaded when running mplayer. I've got all the necessary lirc packages installed i guess. Any ideas on getting lirc to work with the svn release of mplayer?

Only 2 potential problems that I can see. Firstly make sure that you don't try to specifically --enable-lirc in your configure options, with MPlayer the configure process is best left to find the required files itself. If you specify such an option you need also to manually locate all the header files and this is not normally required (in fact I have never had to do it).

Secondly ensure that you have the required dev files, which you may have already. If you were using Intrepid the required file would be:

$ sudo apt-get install liblircclient-dev

and it is probably the same under Hardy but you can check by using the following:

$ sudo apt-cache search lirc | grep dev

This will give a few choices and probably liblircclient-dev will be one of them. You will then need to recompile. Hopefully this is all that is required, in part because that is the limit of my knowledge of lirc .

All the best,

Andrew

[andrew.46]

Hi,

Well, a major rewrite, new title and a change of focus to this guide. I am running Hardy on VirtualBox now and quite prepared to support the guide until 2011. Gutsy has gone I am afraid and with the impending '-end-of-life' it might be a good idea to move on from it anyway . Any problems with the new version of this guide please leave me a note. On my new Hardy install it is all running beautifully!

Andrew

[Roanoke]

I got an error during mplayer compilation.

(Reading database ... 206459 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace mplayer 2:1.0~rc2-0ubuntu17 (using .../mplayer_3:1.0~svn-1_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement mplayer ...
dpkg: error processing /home/roanoke/mplayer/mplayer_3:1.0~svn-1_i386.deb (--install):
 trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/mencoder', which is also in package mencoder
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /home/roanoke/mplayer/mplayer_3:1.0~svn-1_i386.deb

[andrew.46]

Hi Roanoke,

I got an error during mplayer compilation.

(Reading database ... 206459 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace mplayer 2:1.0~rc2-0ubuntu17 (using .../mplayer_3:1.0~svn-1_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement mplayer ...
dpkg: error processing /home/roanoke/mplayer/mplayer_3:1.0~svn-1_i386.deb (--install):
 trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/mencoder', which is also in package mencoder
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /home/roanoke/mplayer/mplayer_3:1.0~svn-1_i386.deb

This is a problem that I have not come to grips with yet. Ubuntu splits MPlayer into a few pieces and then installs them separately while my guide does not. A short term solution is to compile the svn MPlayer without Mencoder by adding the following to the configure string:

--disable-mencoder

I suspect that the repository Mencoder has been installed for the benefit of some other ripping / transcoding program. Doing it this way will be the safest and you will still get to use the latest MPlayer .

Andrew

[mocha]

This is the same problem on Intrepid as you mentioned andrew.46 What I do is first uninstall mencoder from the repo, then compile mplayer/mencoder. Then you can allow whatever other package that needs mencoder as a dependancy to install it from the repo. The repo version goes into /usr/bin but your compiled version is already in /usr/local/bin, so it will always take precedence.