[Howto] MPlayer with CoreAVC

[Zorael]

sudo apt-get install mplayer

[...]

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 mplayer : Depends: mplayer2 but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I think ripps has been packaging mplayer2 for some time now and some way along the road renamed the package to reflect this. Just install mplayer2 instead.

This is a good example of where apt-get falls short while aptitude might have done the trick. When dependency errors show up aptitude will try to offer solutions (eg. "don't install mplayer, install mplayer2 instead"), often several such, whereas apt-get merely concludes it's an unresolvable dependency and exits with errors. On the other hand, apt-get seems to be better at keeping track of automatically installed packages and tags them for removal when they're no longer needed (when using autoremove).

So when you get errors like this, you may want to try the same command but with aptitude. Add the argument -P to force it to always ask for confirmation before proceeding. Do note that apt-get autoremove won't work well on removing automatically installed packages it didn't install itself, so extensively mixing the use of the two is not a good idea over time.

The aptitude in 12.04 is broken on multiarch platforms (like amd64) and basically only works when installing packages, else I normally recommend the use of aptitude for everything besides updating package lists. It still works fine in 11.10 though, so feel free.

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As always, huge thanks to you for packaging this, ripps181.

[ShareBuntu]

Any idea whether mplayer2 + CoreAVC 3.0.1 work together using the CoreAVC-for-Ubuntu method? It doesn't work for me. I've got the rvn PPA enabled for SMPlayer as well as the ripps818 one, so I'm not sure if there's a conflict.

All installs fine, there just isn't any mention of CoreAVC in the SMPlayer logs.

[ripps818]

Any idea whether mplayer2 + CoreAVC 3.0.1 work together using the CoreAVC-for-Ubuntu method? It doesn't work for me. I've got the rvn PPA enabled for SMPlayer as well as the ripps818 one, so I'm not sure if there's a conflict.

All installs fine, there just isn't any mention of CoreAVC in the SMPlayer logs.

It'll probably never work. Dshowserver was made by the Coreavc-for-LInux project, and they're dead now. It would probably have to be rewritten to make it compatible, but I'm not a programmer, so unless you or someone you know wants to take up a challenge, don't expect it to ever get fixed.

[ShareBuntu]

It'll probably never work. Dshowserver was made by the Coreavc-for-LInux project, and they're dead now. It would probably have to be rewritten to make it compatible, but I'm not a programmer, so unless you or someone you know wants to take up a challenge, don't expect it to ever get fixed.

Well that's interesting news. What's the current state of affairs for video playback on Linux? Should I just stick with mplayer2 from your repository? Is there a configuration optimization guide out there somewhere?

[ripps818]

Well that's interesting news. What's the current state of affairs for video playback on Linux? Should I just stick with mplayer2 from your repository? Is there a configuration optimization guide out there somewhere?

mplayer2 with it's static libav (used to be ffmpeg) is pretty good these days, I've been wanting to try some unstable optimizations. It might grab another 1-2% improvement on video decoding, but it could also make it crash on some hardware.

As for settings, always add "-lavdopts fast=1:skiploopfilter=all" for general speedup.