mplayer on RedHat 8.0

[Charles Steinkuehler]

Duane Attaway wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Charles Steinkuehler wrote:
> 
>> Any suggestions for what I should be using to watch DVD's on my 19"  
>> flat-screen via my RH box?  There seem to be several choices (xine,
>> livid, and ogle at least)...are any better or worse than the others?
> 
> I would try mplayer.  It has worked flawlessly when I needed a dvd
> solution fast.  Commercial distributions may be very shy in the patented
> world of multimedia solutions, so you may have a more difficult time
> getting it to work with redheat.  In gentoo, it was "emerge mplayer" and
> the system would do all the dirty work making this one application capable
> of playing every multimedia format I have seen.  Hopefully, someone has a
> quick howto on doing this with redhat.  mplayer is the shopping mall of
> multimedia playback.  It has everything you need in one small package.

Thanks for the tip!  mplayer is very cool!

There are even RPM's available, although they're for RedHat 7.2 or 7.3 
rather than 8.0.  I downloaded the SRPM's, compiled, installed, and 
everything seems to work (well, I did add a /dev/dvd symlink to make 
playback easier).  I can get "Time Bandits" (just picked up at Target 
for $9.49!) to play, although if I size the window too big or make it 
full screen, I get nasty horizontal glitchiness (probably related to my 
NVidia binary drivers, but I'm still playing with mplayer options and 
cruising the forums/FAQs/Docs).  Haven't tried any other disks yet (from 
my extensive collection of (2) DVD's :).

NOTES, If anyone cares:

The mplayer source (and SRPMS) include the required DVD decryption 
libraries...to compile I didn't need anything but the mplayer source 
RPMs and packages already installed by default on my RH8 "workstation" 
install.

System load playing a DVD seems to be pretty non-existant...I haven't 
seen user load go above 3%, and that's typically with something other 
than mplayer topping the "top" list.  A typical top output follows:
<top>
   1:10am  up 1 day,  5:48,  6 users,  load average: 0.18, 0.08, 0.09
84 processes: 81 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  0.9% user,  0.7% system,  0.0% nice, 98.2% idle
Mem:   515620K av,  507520K used,    8100K free,       0K shrd,   88116K 
buff
Swap: 2104496K av,    7992K used, 2096504K free                  311352K 
cached

   PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
13750 charles   15   0 16168  15M 12980 S     0.9  3.1   0:00 mplayer
  3073 root      15   0  274M  18M  5720 S     0.1  3.6   0:52 X
  3204 charles   15   0  1036 1036   912 S     0.1  0.2   1:09 autorun
13779 charles   15   0  1064 1064   840 R     0.1  0.2   0:00 top
     1 root      15   0   476  476   424 S     0.0  0.0   0:04 init
     2 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 keventd
<snip>
</top>

Compilation of mplayer from the three SRPMs (mplayer, fonts, and skins) 
went without a hitch, except for mplayer itself, which was complaining 
about missing codecs.  I think this is related to how they distribute 
the binary RPMs (in several pieces), as the mplayer SRPM built all of 
the codecs it was complaining about needing.  Build with a simple 
rpmbuild --rebuild --nodeps mplayer-<version>.rpm and simply install as 
per the instructions at the mplayer site.  The single mplayer rpmbuild 
yields all the RPMs referred to (mplayer-common, mplayer, mplayer-gui, etc).

As mentioned above, I created a /dev/dvd symlink, as RH didn't create 
one by default...just point it to your DVD drive.

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net