Install & Configure MPlayer – free opensource Media Player in openSUSE

MPlayer is a free opensource movie player which runs on Unix, Linux, Windosw, MacOSX and other operating system platforms.. It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies.

Another great feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too! Most of them support software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen. MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the Siemens DVB, DXR2 and DXR3/Hollywood+.

MPlayer has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls. European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic and Korean fonts are supported along with 12 subtitle formats (MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS and our own: MPsub). DVD subtitles (SPU streams, VOBsub and Closed Captions) are supported as well.

For a list of supported Formats, Audio/Video codecs, Audio/Video output devices click here

To install Mplayer in openSUSE, follow the procedure listed below. I’ve tried the installation here onopenSUSE 11.0 but should work on openSUSE 103 and earlier as well.

Mplayer requires the following pre-requisite packages:

binutils (binutils)

GNU C Compiler (gcc)

Xorg/XFree86 (xorg-x11 & xorg-x11-devel)

Make utility (make)

FreeType fonts (freetype)

ALSA (alsa,alsa-firmware,alsa-utils,alsa-tools)

libjpeg (jpeg)

libpng

DirectFB

lame

zlib (zlib & zlib-devel)

LIVE555 Streaming Media (optional) needed for some RTSP/RTP streams

cdparanoia (built-in on openSUSE 11.0)

libxmms (xmms-lib) [optional]

libsmb [optional]

GTK2 (gtk2 & gtk2-devel)

Install the Pre-requisites

opensuse11:~ # yast2 –install binutils make gcc gtk2-devel lame DirectFB zlib zlib-devel xmms-lib xorg-x11-devel freetype alsa alsa-firmware alsa-tools alsa-utils jpeg libpng

To install Live555 Streaming Media

opensuse11:~ # yast2 –install gcc-c++

opensuse11:~ # wget http://www.live555.com/liveMedia/public/live555-latest.tar.gz

opensuse11:~ # tar -zxvf live555-latest.tar.gz

opensuse11:~ # cd live

opensuse11:~/live # ./genMakefiles linux

opensuse11:~live # make

opensuse11:~live # cp -r live /usr/lib

Install Mplayer

Now, that we have installed all the pre-requisites. Let’s proceed to download and install the Mplayer media player. It is recommended to install Mplayer from source.

Download the Mplayer Source

The latest source files for Mplayer can be downloaded from here

opensuse11:~ # wget http://www8.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/MPlayer-1.0rc2.tar.bz

Unzip & Untar Source

opensuse11:~ # tar -xjf Mplayer-1.0rc2.tar.bz2

Configure & Compile Source

opensuse11:~ # cd Mplayer-1.0rc2

opensuse11:~/ Mplayer-1.0rc2 # ./configure –enable-gui –enable-menu

where –enable-gui enables the GUI support

–enable-menu supports Onscreen Display (OSD)

opensuse11:~ # make

Install MPlayer

opensuse11:~ # make install

That completes the installation of core Mplayer. We now need to install the codecs:

Install Codecs

Download Codec

The latest Codec packages are available here

opensuse11:~ # http://www8.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20071007.tar.bz2

opensuse11:~ # tar -xjf essential-20071007.tar.bz2

opensuse11:~ # mv essential-20071007 /usr/local/lib/codecs

Download and Install Skins

The Skins are required to start the GUI sessions (required when GUI is enabled)

There are a lot of free Skins available here

Let’s install the first on the list “Blue”

opensuse11:~ # wget http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/skins/Blue-1.7.tar.bz2

Unzip & untar

opensuse11:~ # tar -xjf Blue-1.7.tar.bz2

opensuse11:~ # mv Blue /usr/local/share/mplayer/skins/

Mplayer looks into /usr/local/share/mplayer/skins/ directory for the directory named “default”. So, let’s duplicate “Blue” to “default”

opensuse11:~ # cp -r Blue default

Setup OSD

When we compiled with “–enable-menu” switch, it creates menu.conf & input.conf file in “etc” directory under the source folder from where you installed Mplayer. Copy these files into the /usr/local/etc/mplayer/ directory

opensuse11:~ # cd Mplayer-1.0rc2/etc/

opensuse11:~ # cp input.conf menu.conf /usr/local/etc/mplayer/

Setup Fonts

Setup a Symbolic Link to a freetype font as follows:

opensuse11:~ # ln -s /path/to/sample_font.ttf $PREFIX/share/mplayer/subfont.ttf

Example

opensuse11:~ # ln -s /usr/local/fonts/truetype/impact.ttf /usr/local/share/mplayer/impact.ttf

Ok! we are done!!!

Let’s start mplayer. To start Mplayer in GUI mode., run “gmplayer”

opensuse11:~ # gmplayer

To start Mplayer in command line. Type “mplayer” for options.

opensuse11:~ # mplayer dvd://3

Example: To start playing title 2on a DVD

MPlayer 1.0rc2-4.3 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7250 @ 2.00GHz (Family: 6, Model: 15, Stepping: 13)

CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1

Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 SSE SSE2

Playing dvd://3.

There are 33 titles on this DVD.

There are 4 chapters in this DVD title.

There are 1 angles in this DVD title.

audio stream: 0 format: ac3 (stereo) language: en aid: 128.

audio stream: 1 format: ac3 (stereo) language: sv aid: 129.

audio stream: 2 format: ac3 (stereo) language: no aid: 130.

audio stream: 3 format: ac3 (stereo) language: da aid: 131.

audio stream: 4 format: ac3 (stereo) language: fi aid: 132.

audio stream: 5 format: ac3 (stereo) language: nl aid: 133.

number of audio channels on disk: 6.

subtitle ( sid ): 0 language: sv

subtitle ( sid ): 1 language: no

subtitle ( sid ): 2 language: da

subtitle ( sid ): 3 language: fi

subtitle ( sid ): 4 language: nl

number of subtitles on disk: 5

MPEG-PS file format detected.

VIDEO: MPEG2 720×576 (aspect 2) 25.000 fps 8000.0 kbps (1000.0 kbyte/s)

…

..

.

Hope this was useful!