GNU/Linux Media Player Roundup (LinuxOrbit) [LWN.net]

GNU/Linux Media Player Roundup (LinuxOrbit)

Posted Jan 22, 2003 8:46 UTC (Wed) by oever (subscriber, #987)
Parent article: GNU/Linux Media Player Roundup (LinuxOrbit)

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.

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