The main development platform is Linux on x86, although MPlayer works on many other Linux ports. Binary packages of MPlayer are available from several sources. However, none of these packages are supported. Report problems to the authors, not to us. To build a Debian package, run the following command in the MPlayer source directory: fakeroot debian/rules binary If you want to pass custom options to configure, you can set up the DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS environment variable. For instance, if you want GUI and OSD menu support you would use: DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="--enable-gui --enable-menu" fakeroot debian/rules binary You can also pass some variables to the Makefile. For example, if you want to compile with gcc 3.4 even if it's not the default compiler: CC=gcc-3.4 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="--enable-gui" fakeroot debian/rules binary To clean up the source tree run the following command: fakeroot debian/rules clean As root you can then install the .deb package as usual: dpkg -i ../mplayer_version.deb Christian Marillat has been making unofficial Debian packages of MPlayer, MEncoder and our binary codec packages for a while, you can (apt-)get them from his homepage. Dominik Mierzejewski created and maintains the official RPM packages of MPlayer for Red Hat and Fedora Core. They are available from his repository. Mandrake/Mandriva RPM packages are available from the P.L.F.. SuSE used to include a crippled version of MPlayer in their distribution. They have removed it in their latest releases. You can get working RPMs from links2linux.de. MPlayer works on Linux PDAs with ARM CPU e.g. Sharp Zaurus, Compaq Ipaq. The easiest way to obtain MPlayer is to get it from one of the OpenZaurus package feeds. If you want to compile it yourself, you should look at the mplayer and the libavcodec directory in the OpenZaurus distribution buildroot. These always have the latest Makefile and patches used for building a SVN MPlayer. If you need a GUI frontend, you can use xmms-embedded. MPlayer runs on all known BSD flavors. There are ports/pkgsrc/fink/etc versions of MPlayer available that are probably easier to use than our raw sources. To build MPlayer you will need GNU make (gmake - native BSD make will not work) and a recent version of binutils. If MPlayer complains about not finding /dev/cdrom or /dev/dvd, create an appropriate symbolic link: ln -s /dev/your_cdrom_device /dev/cdrom To use Win32 DLLs with MPlayer you will need to re-compile the kernel with "option USER_LDT" (unless you run FreeBSD-CURRENT, where this is the default). If your CPU has SSE, recompile your kernel with "options CPU_ENABLE_SSE" (FreeBSD-STABLE or kernel patches required). Due to limitations in different versions of gas (relocation vs MMX), you will need to compile in two steps: First make sure that the non-native as is first in your $PATH and do a gmake -k, then make sure that the native version is used and do gmake. As of OpenBSD 3.4 the hack above is no longer needed. See the Mac OS section. MPlayer has been ported to a number of commercial Unix variants. Since the development environments on these systems tend to be different from those found on free Unixes, you may have to make some manual adjustments to make the build work. MPlayer should work on Solaris 2.6 or newer. Use the SUN audio driver with the -ao sun option for sound. On UltraSPARCs, MPlayer takes advantage of their VIS extensions (equivalent to MMX), currently only in libmpeg2, libvo and libavcodec, but not in mp3lib. You can watch a VOB file on a 400MHz CPU. You'll need mLib installed. Caveat: mediaLib is currently disabled by default in MPlayer because of brokenness. SPARC users who build MPlayer with mediaLib support have reported a thick, green-tint on video encoded and decoded with libavcodec. You may enable it if you wish with: $ ./configure --enable-mlib You do this at your own risk. x86 users should never use mediaLib, as this will result in very poor MPlayer performance. To build the package you will need GNU make (gmake, /opt/sfw/gmake), native Solaris make will not work. Typical error you get when building with Solaris' make instead of GNU make: % /usr/ccs/bin/make make: Fatal error in reader: Makefile, line 25: Unexpected end of line seen On Solaris SPARC, you need the GNU C/C++ Compiler; it does not matter if GNU C/C++ compiler is configured with or without the GNU assembler. On Solaris x86, you need the GNU assembler and the GNU C/C++ compiler, configured to use the GNU assembler! The MPlayer code on the x86 platform makes heavy use of MMX, SSE and 3DNOW! instructions that cannot be compiled using Sun's assembler /usr/ccs/bin/as. The configure script tries to find out, which assembler program is used by your "gcc" command (in case the autodetection fails, use the --as=/wherever/you/have/installed/gnu-as option to tell the configure script where it can find GNU "as" on your system). Solutions to common problems: Error message from configure on a Solaris x86 system using GCC without GNU assembler: % configure ... Checking assembler (/usr/ccs/bin/as) ... , failed Please upgrade(downgrade) binutils to 2.10.1... (Solution: Install and use a gcc configured with --with-as=gas) Typical error you get when building with a GNU C compiler that does not use GNU as: % gmake ... gcc -c -Iloader -Ilibvo -O4 -march=i686 -mcpu=i686 -pipe -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer -I/usr/local/include -o mplayer.o mplayer.c Assembler: mplayer.c "(stdin)", line 3567 : Illegal mnemonic "(stdin)", line 3567 : Syntax error ... more "Illegal mnemonic" and "Syntax error" errors ... MPlayer may segfault when decoding and encoding video that uses the win32codecs: ... Trying to force audio codec driver family acm... Opening audio decoder: [acm] Win32/ACM decoders sysi86(SI86DSCR): Invalid argument Couldn't install fs segment, expect segfault MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: init_audio_codec ... This is because of a change to sysi86() in Solaris 10 and pre-Solaris Nevada b31 releases. This has been fixed in Solaris Nevada b32; however, Sun has yet to backport the fix to Solaris 10. The MPlayer Project has made Sun aware of the problem and a patch is currently in progress for Solaris 10. More information about this bug can be found at: . Due to bugs in Solaris 8, you may not be able to play DVD discs larger than 4 GB: The sd(7D) driver on Solaris 8 x86 has a bug when accessing a disk block >4GB on a device using a logical blocksize != DEV_BSIZE (i.e. CD-ROM and DVD media). Due to a 32Bit int overflow, a disk address modulo 4GB is accessed (). This problem does not exist in the SPARC version of Solaris 8. A similar bug is present in the hsfs(7FS) filesystem code (AKA ISO9660), hsfs may not not support partitions/disks larger than 4GB, all data is accessed modulo 4GB (). The hsfs problem can be fixed by installing patch 109764-04 (sparc) / 109765-04 (x86). You can either try to install the GNU install program, and (if you did not put it in your global path) then point to the location with: ./configure --with-install=/path/and/name/of/install Or you can use the default install delivered with IRIX 6.5 in which case you will have to edit the Makefile by hand a little bit. Change the following two lines: $(INSTALL) -c -m 644 DOCS/mplayer.1 $(MANDIR)/man1/mplayer.1 $(INSTALL) -c -m 644 etc/codecs.conf $(CONFDIR)/codecs.conf to: $(INSTALL) -m 644 mplayer.1 $(MANDIR)/man1/ $(INSTALL) -m 644 codecs.conf $(CONFDIR)/ And then do (from within the MPlayer source dir): cp DOCS/mplayer.1 . ; cp etc/codecs.conf . and then go on with building and installing. Joe Page hosts a detailed HP-UX MPlayer HOWTO by Martin Gansser on his homepage. With these instructions the build should work out of the box. The following information is taken from this HOWTO. You need GCC 3.4.0 or later, GNU make 3.80 or later and SDL 1.2.7 or later. HP cc will not produce a working program, prior GCC versions are buggy. For OpenGL functionality you need to install Mesa and the gl and gl2 video output drivers should work, speed may be very bad, depending on the CPU speed, though. A good replacement for the rather poor native HP-UX sound system is GNU esound. Create the DVD device scan the SCSI bus with: # ioscan -fn Class I H/W Path Driver S/W State H/W Type Description ... ext_bus 1 8/16/5 c720 CLAIMED INTERFACE Built-in SCSI target 3 8/16/5.2 tgt CLAIMED DEVICE disk 4 8/16/5.2.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE PIONEER DVD-ROM DVD-305 /dev/dsk/c1t2d0 /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0 target 4 8/16/5.7 tgt CLAIMED DEVICE ctl 1 8/16/5.7.0 sctl CLAIMED DEVICE Initiator /dev/rscsi/c1t7d0 /dev/rscsi/c1t7l0 /dev/scsi/c1t7l0 ... The screen output shows a Pioneer DVD-ROM at SCSI address 2. The card instance for hardware path 8/16 is 1. Create a link from the raw device to the DVD device. # ln -s /dev/rdsk/c<SCSI bus instance>t<SCSI target ID>d<LUN> /dev/<device> Example: # ln -s /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0 /dev/dvd Below are solutions for some common problems: Crash at Start with the following error message: /usr/lib/dld.sl: Unresolved symbol: finite (code) from /usr/local/lib/gcc-lib/hppa2.0n-hp-hpux11.00/3.2/../../../libGL.sl This means that the function .finite(). is not available in the standard HP-UX math library. Instead there is .isfinite().. Solution: Use the latest Mesa depot file. Crash at playback with the following error message: /usr/lib/dld.sl: Unresolved symbol: sem_init (code) from /usr/local/lib/libSDL-1.2.sl.0 Solution: Use the extralibdir option of configure --with-extralibdir="/usr/lib -lrt" MPlayer segfaults with a message like this: Pid 10166 received a SIGSEGV for stack growth failure. Possible causes: insufficient memory or swap space, or stack size exceeded maxssiz. Segmentation fault Solution: The HP-UX kernel has a default stack size of 8MB(?) per process.(11.0 and newer 10.20 patches let you increase maxssiz up to 350MB for 32-bit programs). You need to extend maxssiz and recompile the kernel (and reboot). You can use SAM to do this. (While at it, check out the maxdsiz parameter for the maximum amount of data a program can use. It depends on your applications, if the default of 64MB is enough or not.) MPlayer builds successfully on AIX 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3, using GCC 3.3 or greater. Building MPlayer on AIX 4.3.3 and below is untested. It is highly recommended that you build MPlayer using GCC 3.4 or greater, or if you are building on POWER5, GCC 4.0 is required. Ensure that you are using GNU make (/opt/freeware/bin/gmake) to build MPlayer, as you will encounter problems if you use /usr/ccs/bin/make. CPU detection is still a work in progress. The following architectures have been tested: 604e POWER3 POWER4 The following architectures are untested, but should still work: POWER POWER2 POWER5 Sound via the Ultimedia Services is not supported, as Ultimedia was dropped in AIX 5.1; therefore, the only option is to use the AIX Open Sound System (OSS) drivers from 4Front Technologies at http://www.opensound.com/aix.html . 4Front Technologies freely provides OSS drivers for AIX 5.1 for non-commercial use; however, there are currently no sound output drivers for AIX 5.2 or 5.3. This means AIX 5.2 and 5.3 are not capable of MPlayer audio output, presently. Solutions to common problems: If you encounter this error message from configure: $ ./configure ... Checking for iconv program ... no No working iconv program found, use --charset=US-ASCII to continue anyway. Messages in the GTK-2 interface will be broken then. This is because AIX uses non-standard character set names; therefore, converting MPlayer output to another character set is currently not supported. The solution is to use: $ ./configure --charset=noconv Yes, MPlayer runs on Windows under Cygwin and MinGW. It does not have an official GUI yet, but the command line version is completely functional. You should check out the MPlayer-cygwin mailing list for help and latest information. Official Windows binaries can be found on the download page. Installer packages and simple GUI frontends are available from external sources, we have collected then in the Windows section of our projects page. If you wish to avoid using the command line, a simple trick is to put a shortcut on your desktop that contains something like the following in the execute section: c:\path\to\mplayer.exe %1 This will make MPlayer play any movie that is dropped on the shortcut. Add -fs for fullscreen mode. Best results are achieved with the native DirectX video output driver (-vo directx). Alternatives are OpenGL and SDL, but OpenGL performance varies greatly between systems and SDL is known to distort video or crash on some systems. If the image is distorted, try turning off hardware acceleration with -vo directx:noaccel. Download DirectX 7 header files to compile the DirectX video output driver. Furthermore you need to have DirectX 7 or later installed for the DirectX video output driver to work. VIDIX now works under Windows as -vo winvidix, although it is still experimental and needs a bit of manual setup. Download dhahelper.sys or dhahelper.sys (with MTRR support) and copy it to the libdha/dhahelperwin directory in your MPlayer source tree. Open a console and change to that directory. Then type gcc -o dhasetup.exe dhasetup.c and execute dhasetup.exe install as Administrator. After that you will have to reboot. When you are done, copy the .so files from vidix/drivers to the mplayer/vidix directory relative to your mplayer.exe. For best results MPlayer should use a colorspace that your video card supports in hardware. Unfortunately many Windows graphics drivers wrongly report some colorspaces as supported in hardware. To find out which, try mplayer -benchmark -nosound -frames 100 -vf format=colorspace movie where colorspace can be any colorspace printed by the -vf format=fmt=help option. If you find a colorspace your card handles particularly bad -vf noformat=colorspace will keep it from being used. Add this to your config file to permanently keep it from being used. There are special codec packages for Windows available on our download page to allow playing formats for which there is no native support yet. Put the codecs somewhere in your path or pass --codecsdir=c:/path/to/your/codecs (alternatively --codecsdir=/path/to/your/codecs only on Cygwin) to configure. We have had some reports that Real DLLs need to be writable by the user running MPlayer, but only on some systems (NT4). Try making them writable if you have problems. You can play VCDs by playing the .DAT or .MPG files that Windows exposes on VCDs. It works like this (adjust for the drive letter of your CD-ROM): mplayer d:/mpegav/avseq01.dat DVDs also work, adjust -dvd-device for the drive letter of your DVD-ROM: mplayer dvd://<title> -dvd-device d: The Cygwin/MinGW console is rather slow. Redirecting output or using the -quiet option has been reported to improve performance on some systems. Direct rendering (-dr) may also help. If playback is jerky, try -autosync 100. If some of these options help you, you may want to put them in your config file. On Windows the runtime CPU detection disables SSE support because of recurring and hard-to-trace SSE-related crashes. If you wish to have SSE support under Windows, you will have to compile without runtime CPU-detection. If you have a Pentium 4 and are experiencing a crash using the RealPlayer codecs, you may need to disable hyperthreading support. You need to run Cygwin 1.5.0 or later in order to compile MPlayer. DirectX header files need to be extracted to /usr/include/ or /usr/local/include/. Instructions and files for making SDL run under Cygwin can be found on the libsdl site. Installing a version of MinGW that could compile MPlayer used to be quite tricky, but it works out of the box now. Just install MinGW 3.1.0 or later and MSYS 1.0.9 or later and tell the MSYS postinstall that MinGW is installed. Extract DirectX header files to /mingw/include/. MOV compressed header support requires zlib, which MinGW does not provide by default. Configure it with --prefix=/mingw and install it before compiling MPlayer. Complete instructions for building MPlayer and necessary libraries can be found in the MPlayer MinGW HOWTO. MPlayer does not work on Mac OS versions before 10, but should compile out-of-the-box on Mac OS X 10.2 and up. The preferred compiler is the Apple version of GCC 3.x or later. You can get the basic compilation environment by installing Apple's Xcode. If you have Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later and QuickTime 7 you can use the macosx video output driver. Unfortunately, this basic environment will not allow you to take advantage of all the nice features of MPlayer. For instance, in order to have OSD support compiled in, you will need to have fontconfig and freetype libraries installed on your machine. Contrary to other Unixes such as most Linux and BSD variants, OS X does not have a package system that comes with the system. There are at least two to choose from: Fink and MacPorts. Both of them provide about the same service (i.e. a lot of packages to choose from, dependency resolution, the ability to simply add/update/remove packages, etc...). Fink offers both precompiled binary packages or building everything from source, whereas MacPorts only offers building from source. The author of this guide chose MacPorts for the simple fact that its basic setup was more lightweight. Later examples will be based on MacPorts. For instance, to compile MPlayer with OSD support: sudo port install pkgconfig This will install pkg-config, which is a system for managing library compile/link flags. MPlayer's configure script uses it to properly detect libraries. Then you can install fontconfig in a similar way: sudo port install fontconfig Then you can proceed with launching MPlayer's configure script (note the PKG_CONFIG_PATH and PATH environment variables so that configure finds the libraries installed with MacPorts): PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/local/lib/pkgconfig/ PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin/ ./configure You can get a native GUI for MPlayer together with precompiled MPlayer binaries for Mac OS X from the MPlayerOSX project, but be warned: that project is not active anymore. Fortunately, MPlayerOSX has been taken over by a member of the MPlayer team. Preview releases are available from our download page and an official release should arrive soon. In order to build MPlayerOSX from source yourself, you need the mplayerosx, the main and a copy of the main SVN module named main_noaltivec. mplayerosx is the GUI frontend, main is MPlayer and main_noaltivec is MPlayer built without AltiVec support. To check out SVN modules use: svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayerosx/trunk/ mplayerosx svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk/ main In order to build MPlayerOSX you will need to set up something like this: MPlayer_source_directory | |--->main (MPlayer Subversion source) | |--->main_noaltivec (MPlayer Subversion source configured with --disable-altivec) | |--->mplayerosx (MPlayer OS X Subversion source) You first need to build main and main_noaltivec. Next, set a global variable: export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.3 Then, configure: If you configure for a G4 or later CPU with AltiVec support, do as follows: ./configure --with-termcaplib=ncurses.5 --disable-gl --disable-x11 If you configure for a G3-powered machine without AltiVec, use: ./configure --with-termcaplib=ncurses.5 --disable-gl --disable-x11 --disable-altivec You may need to edit config.mak and change -mcpu and -mtune from 74XX to G3. Continue with make then go to the mplayerosx directory and type make dist This will create a compressed .dmg archive with the ready to use binary. You can also use the Xcode 2.1 project; the old project for Xcode 1.x does not work anymore. MPlayer runs on a number of exotic platforms, but most of the platform-specific changes from those systems have not been merged back into the main source tree. For build instructions you should refer to the system-specific documentation. You'll need to download and install SDL for QNX. Then run MPlayer with -vo sdl:driver=photon and -ao sdl:nto options, it should be fast. The -vo x11 output will be even slower than on Linux, since QNX has only X emulation which is very slow. The people over at www.amigasoft.net make current MPlayer and MEncoder packages. Nicholas Det at Genesi has done a big and powerful port of MPlayer for MorphOS. Sadly it's based on the 0.90 series. Get if from MorphZone: MPlayer 0.91 binary MPlayer 0.91 source MEncoder 1.0pre3 binary