Howto: Utilise the svn MPlayer to Improve Karmic Koala's 'mplayer-nogui' Package

[sailor420]

Well, this is going to have to wait a bit--I can't get that source to build. No config or make files included (just the automake files) and when I try to generate with automake, it bombs out.

Next question--I can get passthrough dts/ac3 working over spdif in mplayer with -ao alsa:device=spdif -ac hwac3, but I cannot for the life of me get spdif passthrough working in smplayer. Any ideas? I've tried enabling AC3/DTS passthrough in the smplayer menu, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything.

Of course, as soon as I post about it, I get it working. Here's what I did:

1. Change the driver to ALSA in smplayer config. Pulse doesn't support spdif passthrough from what I can tell.
2. Disable all audio filters in smplayer: uncheck the boxes "Enable the audio equalizer", "global volume", "use software volume control" and "volume normalization by default".

[andrew.46]

Hello Sailor

Glad you worked out spdif thing as I have no idea! libblueray worked well enough for me with the single problem being that I am between Ubuntu installations at the moment and I ran it on slackware . This only required:

git clone git://git.videolan.org/libbluray --depth 1
cd libbluray
./bootstrap
./configure
make

and I did not install this to the system as I do not have a bluray drive after all, however checkinstall should make a decent package pretty easily for ubuntu...

Andrew

[sailor420]

Hello Sailor

Glad you worked out spdif thing as I have no idea! libblueray worked well enough for me with the single problem being that I am between Ubuntu installations at the moment and I ran it on slackware . This only required:

git clone git://git.videolan.org/libbluray --depth 1
cd libbluray
./bootstrap
./configure
make

and I did not install this to the system as I do not have a bluray drive after all, however checkinstall should make a decent package pretty easily for ubuntu...

Andrew

Well that worked. I missed the ./bootstrap script--I saw the configure.ac script and jumped straight to autoconf. Additionally, I needed the libtool packages, but that was easily solved as they are in the ubuntu repositories.

I'll recompile mplayer tonight and see how it goes...

[sailor420]

Got blu-ray working last night! It's still in it's infant stages--menus dont work for instance, and you obviously have to have a valid blu-ray structure that has had the DRM removed (such as AnyDVD would create), but it works! It's a big step for Blu-Ray on Linux.

Here's what I had to do to get it working:

1. apt-get install libtool
2. Compile libbluray with ./bootstrap, ./configure, make, checkinstall.
3. Config, compile, and checkinstall mplayer with --enable-bluray config flag
4. Edit /etc/ld.so.conf to add line "Include /usr/local/lib" at bottom of file
5. Run ldconfig
6. Run mplayer with command mplayer br:////path/to/valid/bluray/folder/structure

[andrew.46]

Hello Sailor,

I am a little jealous, one day I will have to get a bluray drive . My only query is if you really have to specify --enable-blueray, normally with MPlayer libraries such as these are best left to autodetection:

andrew@skamandros~/source/mplayer/mplayer$ ./configure --help | grep 'bluray'
  --disable-bluray       disable Blu-ray support [autodetect]

I agree with you completely, very exciting times are coming .

Andrew

[ron999]

Thanks for a great tutorial andrew.
I've installed mplayer-nogui and smplayer from SVN without problem.

Afterwards I found that the old version of tovid (0.31) that's available through Synaptic seemed to insist on using an old version of mplayer.
So I've installed the current version of tovid (0.33) from their website.

Everthing's hunky dory.

ron@ubuntu:~$ mplayer
MPlayer SVN-r31800-4.3.4 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team
Usage: mplayer [options] [url|path/]filename

[andrew.46]

Hi Ron,

Glad to hear the guide worked for you .

Andrew

[mc4man]

In another interesting flip-flop with mplayer - maverick atm has gone back to using mplayer with the internal ffmpeg enabled, to bad it's a 15 month old version belatedly released in may (MPlayer 1.0rc3
So baring either a change in normal policy (releases over a svn version) or a newer mplayer 'release', building or ppa's will continue to hold great advantage

[ron999]

So baring either a change in normal policy (releases over a svn version) or a newer mplayer 'release', building or ppa's will continue to hold great advantage

Is this tutorial valid for other Ubuntu releases, not just Karmic?

[mc4man]

Is this tutorial valid for other Ubuntu releases, not just Karmic?

Sure - you can use the basis of this guide for lucid or maverick.

The main difference is there have been some dependency changes - mainly name changes for the same libs.
(also just keep informed if any new libs can be added for added support

I outlined this to some extent in post # 241

Also I'd adjust the checkinstall command in lucid and maverick to name it just mplayer instead of mplayer-nogui

Andrew's guides all present solid 'methods' that should be good for quite some time with minor adjustments if needed.


Edit: atm my laptop, which has the most enabled mplayer (lucid, nvidia), is unavailable till later today - thankfully the gpu burned out - the tech should be here today to replace the mobo - I'll ck. then to see what deps I used or added, if any, from prior posted list