> OK so there are no good rpm versions, so I have to compile from tar > balls. > I've just spent 2 hours reading all the bumf on Mplayer website, and > I must say there is so much of it it is hard to take it all in in one > hit. > > It seems to me leaving aside esotyeric things like skins, there is > only the one MPlayer-0.90pre5.tar.bz file to compile and install. > Does this actually mean it's all there, you know, encription, > conversion, etc etc, the bits that really do matter and make the > programme all it is,because it seems a small download for a tar file > and for there to be everything that you might conceiveably want. > As I say I'm not particularly interested in sky blue pink graphics > but I do want all the really important encription conversion > stuff,(eg. DVD to DivX) and preferably in a gui guise. > > John
download the tarball ( it contains MPlayer and Mencoder and it will do everything you say you need ) and at least one skin. ( the skin works for MPlayer, but for Mencoder you will still have to use CLI for now. ) oh and you will probably need the codecs, too. download the package named "win32 codecs" unpack it and copy all of it's contents to /usr/lib/win32 unpack the mplayer-0.90pre5 tarball, enter it's directory, and do this: ./configure --enable-gui make make install once you have done this, you unpack your mplayer skin to /home/(your-user)/.mplayer/Skin ( note the capital S on "Skin" ) and put the skin in a subdirectory. (i.e. if you downloaded "default" skin, copy it to /home/(user)/.mplayer/Skin/default/ as you have compiled and installed MPlayer as root, make sure you give your user permission to read the skin files. otherwise mplayer will report it didn't find any. chmod +777 -R /home/(user)/.mplayer ... and i think that's all there is to it. MPlayer is a huge program, but all of those tons of information will be severely reduced once it compiles in your machine and excludes all the stuff your computer doesn't need. don't worry. once all is done, you can launch mplayer ( CLI ) or gmplayer ( GUI ) mplayer's biggest problem for a newbie is choosing the video output ( " vo" ), since you may found better features/speed with some drivers depending on your videocard. some video drivers installed may not even work. However SDL or X11 seem to work for almost everyone. ( " mplayer -vo sdl moviefile.avi " ) you can also play net streams, or to dump them to disk ;o) ( " mplayer -vo sdl mms://server.net/moviefile.asf " ) and ( " mplayer -dumpstream mms://server.net/moviefile.asf " will create a "stream.dump" file that you can then rename to *.asf ) and mencoder ( CLI ) encodes movie files in virtually any format available. notice, however, that mencoder requires very precise parameters in the commandline, so it requires some reading... HTH Damian
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