This was disabled by default, and could be enabled with -dr. It was
disabled by default because it was buggy: there were issues with OSD
corruption.
It wasn't entirely sane for OpenGL based VOs either. OpenGL can chose
to drop mapped pixel buffer objects, requiring the application to map
and fill the buffer again. But there was no mechanism in mplayer to
fill the lost buffer again. (It seems this rarely happened in practice,
though.)
On the other side, users liked the --dr flag, because it promised them
more speed. I'm not sure if it actually helped with speed, but it's
unlikely it had any real advantages on modern systems.
In order to evade the --dr cargo culting in mplayer config files, it's
best to get rid of it.
Compiling with full features requires development files for several
external libraries. Below is a list of some important requirements. For
more information see the output of './configure --help' for a list of options,
or look at the list of enabled and disabled features printed after running
'./configure'. If you think you have support for some feature installed
but configure fails to detect it, the file config.log may contain information
about the reasons for the failure.
Libraries specific to particular video output methods
(you'll want at least one of VDPAU, GL or Xv):
- libvdpau (for VDPAU output, best choice for NVIDIA cards)
- libGL (OpenGL output)
- libXv (XVideo output)
general:
- libasound (ALSA audio output)
- various general X development libraries
- libfreetype (for libass)
- libfontconfig (for libass)
- libass
- FFmpeg libraries (libavutil libavcodec libavformat libswscale libpostproc)
Most of the above libraries are available in suitable versions on normal
Linux distributions. However FFmpeg is an exception (distro versions may be
too old to work at all or work well). For that reason you may want to use
the separately available build wrapper that first compiles FFmpeg libraries
and libass, and then compiles the player statically linked against those.