GNU/Linux Media Player Roundup (LinuxOrbit)

Posted Jan 22, 2003 8:46 UTC (Wed) by oever (subscriber, #987) [Link]

But unfortunately, it can be difficult to install I am going to leave it out of this review.

Mplayer is distributed as "source only" for performance, legal and l337ness reasons.

Both of these statements are not true. MPlayer is provided in SuSE 8.1 as RPM. There are no legal reasons anymore that hinder binary versions of MPlayer. Also performance is not heaviliy hampered by using a binary version: MPlayer can autodetect the processor type.

And lastly, installing from source is not very difficult either. The basic install is simple: (./configure; make; make install) like most source packages.If additionally, you'd like to view some movies in a proprietary format, then you need to install some binary files. If you'd like subtitles you need some additional fonts and if you want a GUI, you need to install a skin. These dependencies could have been avoided, but since version 1 has not been released and the binary, font and gui packages do not change often, so I think leaving them out of the main package is sensible for downloading reasons.

It's silly to leave out MPlayer. It's the most powerful player at the moment! It's the only player that can play anything I've encountered. The article does discuss players built in MPlayer libraries, which should be more difficult to install, because you need to install MPlayer first.

Posted Jan 22, 2003 9:45 UTC (Wed) by erich (subscriber, #7127) [Link]

The reason mplayer is not included in Debian is that it containes non-free code (although they are working heavily to get rid of that code afaik)
The other statments were true afaik:
Mplayer upstream said they did not want binary packages, because they aren't as optimized as they would like to... that changed when they managed reliable processor-detection.
Of course there have always been mplayer debian packages available in private repositories; so when the licencing issues are resolved the package will immedeately be uploaded in the pool - well tested.
I personally use mplayer a lot (because of its fast startup) but it definitely has some ugly issues. Like when resizing it somehow collides with sawfish, and they "battle" each other and resize the window until i quit mplayer... Ugly, not being able to resize the window sometimes... (seems to occur when mplayer tries to enforce a window aspect. mplayer is the only application i've seen that effect in ever)