MPlayer to the Rescue

I finally got around to installing the Linux version of Real Player 10, but unfortunately it just didn’t work. The install appeared to go smoothly, and I even got a nifty icon in the KDE menu under Multimedia, but the program never opened or ran.

Having a fairly immediate need for it, I opted to just install MPlayer and be done with it. Installation is a lot harder than it needs to be (or should be), but the end result is well worth the trouble. Rather than link another site yet again, I thought I’d just share what I did here.

First things first: download everything, preferably into the same directory. From the MPlayer download page, grab the MPlayer sources and the essential codecs package (more can be added later, but the essentials provides all most users need and more). There are binaries, but I’ve had much better luck with the sources, even on RPM-based systems. You will also need a Fonts package and a skin. For the latter, you can get a preview of the skins by clicking the names. Proton happens to be my favorite, so I started with it.

For the browser plug-in, you’ll need two packages: the plug-in sources and version 1.7 of the gecko-sdk development kit. The mplayerplug-in INSTALL says to grab 1.6, but we’re running version 1.7 of Mozilla these days, so I upgraded.

Unzip everything. To unzip the tar.gz files, use tar -zxvf filename. To unzip the tar.bz2 files, use tar -jxvf filename.

Before we can configure MPlayer, we need to place our codecs. Drop into the codecs folder, then run the following as root (most systems require root privileges to write to the /usr directory):

mkdir /usr/local/lib/codecs
cp * /usr/local/lib/codecs/

Now change to the MPlayer directory, where we’re ready to compile and install everything. Run the following commands:

./configure --enable-gui
make (this takes a while - get something to drink)
make install (run this step as root)

Before we can actually use MPlayer, we need to place a default skin and our fonts. Make both directories as follows:

mkdir ~/.mplayer/font
mkdir ~/.mplayer/Skin/default (note the capital S)

In the fonts directory, you will find four different sizes of fonts. Choose your font size, then drop into that directory and cp * ~/.mplayer/font/. Then drop into your skin directory and run cp * ~/.mplayer/Skin/default/.

And now MPlayer’s finished. Run gmplayer from the command line or from the Run line and you’ll be presented with a nice GUI. If you would like more skins to play with, download them and place them (with their correct names) in the ~/.mplayer/Skin directory. You will now be able to use the GUI to choose your skin on the fly.

Building mplayerplug-in from source isn’t hard, it just requires a reference to the gecko-sdk during the configuration. (The instructions suggest building with the default options, but it never works for me.) Run configure as ./configure --with-gecko-sdk=/path/to/unzipped/gecko-sdk. My path happened to be ~/downloads/mplayer/gecko-sdk. After that run make and make install. You don’t need root privileges to run the latter, as it will install the plugin in your home directory. To install system-wide, consult mplayerplug-in’s INSTALL file.

And there you have it. With the latest versions (MPlayer 1.0pre5 and mplayerplug-in 2.66), I haven’t had any troubles playing videos. I have sound (which I didn’t have on Fedora Core 2), and even the Quicktime movie trailers at Apple.com play right in the browser (which has never worked for me before).

MPlayer rules.