Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

Ron Clarke wrote:
>
>    Does your mplayer have any easy-to-install front ends ?  i.e.
> something that would act as a file-finder ?   At the moment I am using
> mplayer (and xine, mtvp, QV, and several others) as "helpers" to mc (console
> and X),
>  emelfm (X), Links (console and X), etc., but on low resource systems
> that may be too much overhead.

Links has too much overhead? Compared to mplayer, it is
tiny.

You can see mplayer's long list of front and back ends at:

http://mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/projects.html

Possibly the easiest to install is xmms-mplayer if you also have
XMMS (winamp-like media player). It lets you use xmms (gui)
to select files and then it plays them back with mplayer. You
can get a binary copy from linuxpackages.net. I tried but
could not find any working Slackware-type binaries, only
source code for several other of the front ends that were
listed there, and I think that installing a binary package should
be easier than compiling from source.


Among the more unusual projects there is Lives, which is a
video editor that uses Gtk2 and perl. When you install
mplayer and mencoder, lives uses those two programs to
encode and decode video. You can also install Image
Magick and it will use that to put special effects on your
video. All of the precompiled binaries that I saw crashed
with my glibc2.3 setup, so I compiled one from source and
that worked.

It takes about 30-45 seconds to start up on my Pentium
2, but once it is loaded it is reasonably fast for a video
editing system. It is still probably not useful for BL-type
hardware. However, for any video editing system, it is
quite powerful - you can add effects and watch them
render in real time. I haven't seen any software like this
before.

transcode is also listed there at the mplayer site. It is
similar to mencoder but smaller and not quite as fully
featured.

David