MPlayer from CVS in FC4
I’ve been following along with the improvements made by the MPlayer development team through their mailing list. When Fedora Core 4 came out there were some (I think many) issues with the choice to use GCC4 (the GNU Compiler). Many applications, such as MPlayer, were not yet supported. There were patches from other groups, but the MPlayer team did not officially support it. As usual I compiled from source, but I used GCC3.2. I’ve never had any problems.
A week ago I pulled a CVS snapshot through their website and decided to compile and test a developmental version to see anything new. I installed along side my current version of MPlayer v1.0pre7. (I used --prefix=/opt/mplayercvs/ during the configure step.) It all seemed to work perfectly with GCC4. Some basic things I noticed were better support for some media formats and full support for many output plugins that didn’t work with the GCC3.2 workaround. Finally they also have ported the GUI to GTK2. The forever old (and still very poor) gui was using GTK1.2 and has now been deprecated. Although I don’t see any new features in the GUI, it is nice to finally have a consistent GTK/Gnome interface - fonts, themes and all.
Basically good progress, but not recommended for average users. I am looking forward to the new release, even though lately it seems Xine has seemed like a better alternative.
Posted in: FC4, Multimedia, Software,
3 Comments:
Jeff Schiller on October 18, 2005 - 08:20 PM
If you think the GUI sucks for MPlayer in Linux, have you tried using it in Windows? Command-line only, my friend ;)
Mauriat on October 18, 2005 - 08:20 PM
Actually, being the geek that I am - Yes I have. I’ve tried both the distributed one you can get through the mingw port AND I compiled it for myself through Cygwin. However, when I tried it some time back I do remember it had a horrible GUI that supported some basic features. The version I compiled was convenient for doing some ripping and conversions - otherwise useless.
Jeff Schiller on October 18, 2005 - 11:23 PM
I love MPlayer through the command line, actually. It’s enormously powerful, though I’ve only used it for simple rippage and for occasional playback (haven’t used MEncoder for anything, in other words). Yes, a GUI would be nice - but then, they might get on a certain company-that-has-their-own-media player’s radar…