Baslinux mailing list

[David Moberg <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

sindi keesan wrote:

> I have on my computer, having renamed the versions:
>
> 1.  mplayeralsa.tgz (the one that did not work with oss) - 3120386K
>   - did this one need pentium II to play mp3?

It will not play any audio file, on any CPU, without sox or a recent
kernel.

> 2.  mplayerp1.tgz - 3170192K - does not need Pentium II
>
> 3.  mplayer3 (gunzipped) - 7015424 - the one I am using.  Might be the
> same as number 2.

It is. I think that mplayerp1.tgz is the bzip2 version, which you
probably fixed manually.

> Did I miss the latest package?

Maybe. You appear to have the second-to-latest version, which was
known to _not_ work with racook. I suggest that you upgrade to the
latest version.

I noticed that you have mplayer4.tgz on your BL download site,
which is the latest version.

> I kept them all because it was not clear to me which ones had which
> advantages.

The latest version is completely superior to all of the older versions,
except it is a little larger than the first two versions (but it does much
more).

> You could also, for BL, put ao=oss in
> the config file as default.  Mplayer won't play sounds without specifying
> some sound system.

I have not had to specify any -ao option with BL. Perhaps that was
a bug that has been fixed in the latest version?

I think there were five versions of MPlayer that I built:

1) This one was just a bzip2'd mplayer binary. It only worked with
i686 machines and had no support for racook or anything like that,
but it was the smallest glibc-based binary that I built to date.

2) This one was a package of mplayer, mencoder and some
scripts to unpack everything. It did work with 486 machines, but
it did not play audio correctly without sox and did not even
work in X.

3) I determined that the problem with 2) was that it was built
with uClibc, and there was some kind of interaction between
MPlayer and uClibc. So I rebuilt with glibc and posted this
one. Just like the first two, there was no racook support.
The use of bzip2 for compression spectacularly corrupted
this package, so I posted a quick fix to get it to work.

4) This was exactly the same as 3, except I switched to lzma
so that it would download correctly.

5) Several people on the list eventually requested racook
and other codec support, so I added that to 4).

6) This one has not been built, so I cannot comment.
Expected features: working subtitles support, svgalib and
other output, perhaps a dynamic glibc version for BL2?

David