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 -lavdopts threads=n moviefile

Instead of constantly typing that command, you can also add it to the invaluable mplayer config file located at ~/.mplayer/config:

[default]
lavdopts=threads=2

Obviously I’m not one of the happy few that have a graphics card with support for hardware accelerated video playback (vdpau for nvidia). When playing a 1080p high definition movie without vdpau and with the singlethreaded mplayer, the movie becomes pretty much unwatcheable: video stuttering, audio running behind on video or vica versa, fastforwarding crashes mplayer, … It’s odd that in a world full of multicore processors, a multithreaded video player isn’t a commodity and probably never will be. Nonetheless I believe there is actually a market for this. After all, not everyone has a fairly recent graphics card (less than 3 yeard old).

With the multithreaded mplayer all of that changes. I am in the possession of an AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+, the first dual core cpu series of AMD, and playback of a 1080p movie with a video bitrate of 15.5Mbps is smooth. It doesn’t even use the 2 cores to their full potential. It appears I only needed a little more but o so necessary cpu power to play it. Until I buy a recent graphics card, hopefully in the very near future, this will certainly do the trick.

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.

Introduction

To acquire a good MPlayer setup, I recommend not to install the version packaged by your favorite distribution. The mainstream linux distributions like Ubuntu ship “the latest” but very dated release of MPlayer. Their latest release,  v1.0rc3, dates from 30 May 2010. While not that dated, it is in fact a rather old snapshot of MPlayer. That doesn’t mean MPlayer isn’t actively being developed. MPlayer developers make continuous changes to their latest development version, generally referred to as the SVN version, rather than releasing official versions. This SVN version is stable 99% of the time – and if it isn’t, it will be the next day. Unfortunately, you will have to build it yourself. I will try to guide you through this rather lengthy process.

The build process consists of 3 main steps:

• Install x264
• Install FFmpeg and useful multimedia libraries
• Install MPlayer

Part I: x264

x264 is necessary for encoding videos using the  MPEG 4 AVC (H264/x264) codec. This codec is one of the best and most popular codecs used (e.g. Blu-Ray) and undispensible if you intend to do some encoding. Before we continue, make sure you have the necessary build tools. They are usually bundled by your distribution in a general “build” package. Ubuntu, for example, has put everything in build-essential. Consult your distribution’s documentation to figure out what packages you need.

x264 depends on the following packages:

• libx11 (optional)
• gpac (optional)

The packages git, yasm and gettext are necessary for building x264. Technically you can remove the build dependencies after the x264 installation is completed but you will need them so often you might as well leave them installed. The installation of x264 goes as follows:

1. Get the sources:

git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git

2. Configure x264:

cd x264/
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-shared --enable-pic

You don’t need to worry much about these configuration options. You can get more info on the available configuration options with ./configure –help (that’s two ‘-’ in case you are wondering). Note that the optional dependencies mentioned above are not enabled.

3. Build and install x264:

make && sudo make install

You can verify that x264 is correctly installed by typing  x264 –version (again, two ‘-’). You might have encountered a build error during the installation process. Therefore I advise you to always carefully read the output generated by ./configure and make. Errors are usually printed at the end of the output. There is no point in continuing with another step/command if you have an error. Errors often occur because you overlooked a required dependency.

Part II: Install FFmpeg and useful multimedia libraries

Now let’s continue with FFmpeg. FFmpeg and MPlayer are practically twins. FFmpeg provides MPlayer with the most important tools to play multimedia: the common and not so common codecs for playback and encoding, (de)muxers for opening containers like mp4 and avi, filters and post processors.

MPlayer’s svn server already holds a copy of FFmpeg but we’re going to install an independent one nonetheless. The main disadvantage of using a built-in FFmpeg is that MPlayer and MPlayer only can make use of it. This means that if another program requires FFmpeg, you will have to install it again which leads to a lot of duplicate FFmpegs. An advantage of having a built-in FFmpeg over a separate one is that the devs have full control over the entire build process.

This is a list of libraries that I recommend to install for FFmpeg. Try to install them with the package management installer that comes with your distribution.

• xvidcore – support for xvid codec
• faac – AAC encoding
• smbclient – network files playback
• lame – mp3 encoding
• libtheora, libvorbis – support for the open source theora and vorbis codec
• zlib – support for compression
• libvdpau – support hardware accelerated video playback

Many libraries such as xvidcore, libvorbis or libtheora are not necessary for playback (FFmpeg is capable of doing so on its own) but may be necessary for encoding support.

1. Get the source:

svn co svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg

2. Compile it:

cd ffmpeg/
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-nonfree --enable-pthreads --enable-postproc --enable-shared --enable-network --enable-vdpau --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --enable-libfaac --enable-libxvid --enable-libx264 --enable-libtheora --arch=`uname -m`

Remember to check ./configure –help for more information on the configuration options. After the ./configure [...] command, a nice layout with all the supported codecs and much more will be printed.

3. Build and install it:

make && sudo make install

Et voilà. You should have a working FFmpeg. You can verify that you installed it successfully by running ffmpeg -version.

I will remind you here again that you may have encountered a build error during the installation process. Therefore I advise you to always carefully read the output generated by ./configure and make. Errors are usually printed at the end of the output. There is no point in continuing with another step/command if you have an error. Errors often occur because you overlooked a required dependency.

Part III: Install MPlayer

Now we can finally move on to installing MPlayer. Some additional packages you could install:

• freetype, fribidi, aalib – unicode and ascii support (subtitles)
• live555 – support for streaming
• libmpcdec – musepack
• opengl, libxmvc, libxv – more video and audio outputs (most recommended are libxv and opengl).

They’re all optional dependencies but they increase the capabilities of MPlayer.

1. Get the sources:

svn co svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

The configure script of MPlayer incorporates a sort of auto-detection. It will check for a certain library/feature where it is normally located and configure itself accordingly. It is therefore recommended not to force or –enable an option in the ./configure line as it breaks the path detection of that feature.

2. Configure MPlayer without built-in (shared) ffmpeg:

./configure --prefix=/usr --confdir=/etc/mplayer --disable-gui --enable-menu --enable-runtime-cpudetection --enable-largefiles --disable-libavcore_a --disable-libavutil_a --disable-libavcodec_a --disable-libavformat_a --disable-libpostproc_a --disable-libswscale_a

The configure options that end with _a disable the built-in ffmpeg. The rest is pretty self-explanatory. You can save some space and compilation time by disabling unneeded features. Things I usually disable, are:

--disable-inet6 --disable-xinerama --disable-tv  --disable-radio  --disable-ossaudio --disable-jack --disable-esd --disable-lirc --disable-dvb --disable-v4l2

More information on the configure options can be found by executing ./configure –help.

Now build and install MPlayer:

make && sudo make install

Again, check the outputs of each command for errors. You can verify that mplayer is installed correctly with the command mplayer <path to video file>. As mentioned before, I’ll deal with the good guis for MPlayer in the next article.

If you come across an error during one of the installs and you can’t figure out how to fix them, drop a note and I’ll try to help out wherever possible.

The follow up, Comprehensive Guide III: Video Playback & Desktop Integration, will soon be available.

The guide includes 4 major sections:

• Introduction
• Installation
• Video Playback & Desktop Integration
• Video Encoding

of which this is the first section: the introduction.

There are a lot of video players at hand. I’m going to use MPlayer, but why’s that?. MPlayer is by far the best multimedia player for linux. Not only does it handle video and audio content perfectly, it’s also capable of playing streams and integrates nicely in your browser.  It even supports video hardware acceleration for those with a recent video card. Yes, there are some alternatives like VLC, but none are as flexible as MPlayer.  You can easily determine which codecs should be enabled and which not. You’re not stuck with one gui. There are multiple guis available for several platforms. No matter what environment you are using, there’s a solution for every one of them.

Another thing that stands out is MEncoder. MEncoder is a part of MPlayer and, while not officially supported and developed anymore, it is a tool to easily encode audio & video and extract subtitles. Everything you ever needed for encoding media is included in this application. Combining MPlayer and MEncoder make the perfect multimedia application.

The follow-up, Comprehensive MPlayer Guide II: Installation is now available.

First we need a recent version of dvdread and dvdnav, two libraries that allow us to view and navigate through dvd menus. We start with dvdread. Again, you will probably have a very old version of dvdread, so we get a recent version. Dvdread depends on libdvdcss so make sure you have it. You will also need the tools to compile from source of course.

1. Get the source:
wget http://www7.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/dvdnav/libdvdread-4.1.3.tar.bz2
2. Unpack it and navigate to the directory:
tar xvfj libdvdread-4.1.3.tar.bz2
cd libdvdread-4.1.3
3. Compile, build and install:
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Now we do the same for dvdnav:

1. Get the source:
wget http://www8.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/dvdnav/libdvdnav-4.1.3.tar.bz2
2. Unpack it and navigate to the directory:
tar xvfj libdvdnav-4.1.3.tar.bz2
cd libdvdnav-4.1.3.tar.bz2
3. Compile, build and install:
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Now that we have everything to read a dvd and its dvd menu, it’s time to install mplayer with this functionality.

1. Get the source:
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
2. Navigate to the directory:
cd mplayer
3. Compile, build and install. There are a lot of configuration options available for mplayer, but I will only mention the ones you need to enable dvd menus.

./configure --disable-dvdread-internal --enable-dvdnav
make
sudo make install

Now hurry up and try out some fancy dvd menu with mplayer. Here are a few of The Terminal: