HowTo: Install the very latest MPlayer under Jaunty Jackalope

[dot2kode]

@andrew.46

Followed your tutorial and everything worked perfectly...Thanks alot for taking the time and putting this up...Exactly what Linux needs is user's that put these tutorials together and help answer questions people have...I ran through it on a virtualbox Jaunty rc1 with no problems and did it on my 'real' jaunty install...Thanks again!!

p.s. I'll revert to an older session and do video of your tutorial...Installed some of the 'record my desktop' software and need something to actually record

BTW I played .mkv 720 and 1080's just fine and of course .avi's

[andrew.46]

Hi dot2kode,

Followed your tutorial and everything worked perfectly...Thanks alot for taking the time and putting this up...Exactly what Linux needs is user's that put these tutorials together and help answer questions people have...I ran through it on a virtualbox Jaunty rc1 with no problems and did it on my 'real' jaunty install...Thanks again!!

I am glad to hear that it all ran well. I sometimes forget that for the most part people get through this guide with no problems, mostly people post if they have problems. So thanks for taking the time to report success .

p.s. I'll revert to an older session and do video of your tutorial...Installed some of the 'record my desktop' software and need something to actually record

Don't be too alarmed when you find that this software produces theora video amd vorbis sound wrapped in an ogg media container .

All the very best,

Andrew

[NorQue]

Lately mplayer doesn't seem to want to take Video via standard input anymore. I used to play .rar'ed Videos via unrar and piping output to mplayer, but since a few days this produces only repeated messages like that:

user@comp:~/Downloads/videos/videodir$ unrar p -inul video.rar|mplayer -
MPlayer SVN-r29218-4.3.3 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team

Playing -.
Reading from stdin...
Cannot seek backward in linear streams!
Seek failed
Cannot seek backward in linear streams!
Seek failed
Cannot seek backward in linear streams!
Seek failed
[...]
Exiting... (End of file)

Unluckily I forgot to note which SVN Version this first happened with, but with the one from three weeks ago it still worked.

Is that a mplayer bug or did I do something stupid somewhere? Any input? What should I do if it's a bug? There a, umh, guide for filing bug reports?

[rvm4000]

What should I do if it's a bug? There a, umh, guide for filing bug reports?

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html

[andrew.46]

Hi NorQue,

Lately mplayer doesn't seem to want to take Video via standard input anymore. I used to play .rar'ed Videos via unrar and piping output to mplayer,

I can confirm this problem with the current svn. RVM has given you the details for a full bug report but it would be useful if you are serious about getting a good bug report to do some regression testing:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en...sion_test.html

If you can isolate the exact update that killed this functionality it should be a trivial matter to repair it. If you can write the patch yourself all the better .

Can I suggest if you go ahead with this that you spend a little time lurking on MPlayer-users and the developer mailing list before posting? The developers are busy, highly focussed people and often have little tolerance for those who broke unwritten and written rules of posting.

All the best,

Andrew

[andrew.46]

Hi again NorQue!

Looks like for some clips MPlayer needs a cache setting if you are going to pipe in this way. I have had success doing this, see attached screenshot, so try a setting like:

$ unrar p -inul video.rar | mplayer -cache 2048 -

and I would be surprised if this did not work.

All the best,

Andrew

[NorQue]

Yepp, that cache setting did the trick, thanks a lot!

Still, I'm wondering why it worked so long without it, I've been using that command (in a nautilus script for easier accesability) for more than a year now.

[andrew.46]

Hi NorQue,

Yepp, that cache setting did the trick, thanks a lot!

Still, I'm wondering why it worked so long without it, I've been using that command (in a nautilus script for easier accesability) for more than a year now.

Glad that helped. It is a great example of at least part of the reason that I write this and other guides: I did not know that unrar existed before your post so I have learnt something very useful from your question . But somebody much more clever than me would have to work out what has changed to make MPlayer need some cache in this way...

All the very best,

Andrew

[Nullack]

Andrew thanks very much for the fix You sir are no idiot, your a generous and caring individual that is a true example of Ubuntu's spirit.

Putting the font in a global area IMHO is better as it makes the config correct for all users out of the box.

Seems mplayer SVN is having some problems at the moment:

nullack@PPP:~/src/mplayer$ svn update
svn: Unknown hostname 'svn.mplayerhq.hu'

[andrew.46]

Hi Nullack,

Andrew thanks very much for the fix You sir are no idiot, your a generous and caring individual that is a true example of Ubuntu's spirit.

Thanks for your kind words. It is perhaps just as well that you did not witness my 3 hour session of abusing Jaunty, Ubuntu, Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth in turn as I struggled to get mouse integration working with VirualBox and Jaunty guest .

All the very best,

Andrew