If you look at the current package list:

• x264
• ffmpeg
• mplayer
• ffmpeg-mt
• mplayer-mt
• mpd
• netembryo
• rxvt-unicode

you might be wondering why I provide these packages. All but three can be found in the official repositories after all. In short: I either upgrade them much more frequently, they differ much from the official packages, they are not available in the official repsitories or all of the above. Now I will go more in depth for each package.

x264, ffmpeg and mplayer

These 3 packages are being actively developed. Many new changes are made even in the scope of just a week. Understandably, the arch packagers can’t rebuild these packages whenever changes are made. I repackage them on a monthly base which makes my packages usually a lot more up to date than the official ones.

This, however, is not the main reason I make these 3 packages available. The official arch mplayer build incorporates its own internal static version of ffmpeg (as recommended by the mplayer devs), ignoring the already available ffmpeg on most systems. This approach results in duplication of code and bigger packages. In the programming community, duplication of code is something that one tries to avoid at all cost, as this usually implies a bad design. I apply the same principle to my packages: compile once and use them everyone else.

Some less commonly used options in mplayer and ffmpeg are also disabled:

• No image support in mplayer.
• Many exotic audio/video ouputs and audio/video codecs are disabled.
• No tv or radio support
• …

I also include features not available in the official mplayer package such as pulseaudio support. I’m a huge fan of pulseaudio and support it in all the packages that can handle it.

ffmpeg-mt and mplayer-mt

ffmpeg-mt and mplayer-mt are the multithreaded versions of ffmpeg and mplayer respectively. They have the same feature set as mentioned in the topic on their single threaded versions. If you have no graphics card that supports hardware accelerated video playback, then this is what you want to playback high definition movies.

mpd

In this package, I mainly strip away less commonly used options and only add 1 new feature:

• no http output
• no last.fm support
• no oss output
• no ipv6
• pulseaudio support

netembryo and libnemesi

I maintain both netembryo and libnemesi in AUR and might as well just make a binary version available as well.

rxvt-unicode

This build contains a particular patch that fixes the resizing of this terminal in tiling window managers. Otherwise there always black borders surrounding each terminal window which is just plain annoying

MPlayer has initial support for libnemesi to handle rtsp stream, as an alternative for live555 and that would be the only reason I wanted to try it out. MPlayer should automatically detect libnemesi. Otherwise you will have to append the –extra-cflags option to the ./configure statement.

While netembryo is getting more and more stable, libnemesi is still in early development and  no official release exists as of yet. In fact, many libnemesi revisions don’t even want to compile so it can be a real drag to find one that does. I’ll save you some time: the public git version of 20090501 works.