Mplayer Update

Rather than watch the Redskins season go absolutely, positively down the tubes, or contemplate the election, let's discuss mplayer, one of Linux's two video players (the other being xine) that has a chance of playing files made in Windows (a trademark of Microsoft).

This was prompted by a Slashdot posting of a video of the recent lunar eclipse. Unfortunately, the video was made with Adobe's Premiere Pro and saved in a .wav file with some codec that I didn't have, and wouldn't play in mplayer or xine. The Slashdot solution was to download the newest codec tarball and recompile. This seemed like a lot of work. So I went to the mplayer site and found the RPMs for Fedora Core 1. Looking around the site, I finally determined that I needed:

mplayer-1.0pre5-2.i386.rpm
mplayer-common-1.0pre5-2.i386.rpm
mplayer-font-iso1-1.1-1.noarch.rpm
mplayer-codecs-essential-20040704-1.i386.rpm
mplayer-gui-1.0pre5-2.i386.rpm
mplayer-skin-default-1.4-1.noarch.rpm

You'll need to search around for all of these. Look under both "essential" and "optional" downloads.

Problem: So of these RPMs conflict with my current mplayer setup. Which I got from the Fedora Core 1 distribution, which isn't supported anymore, meaning that I might not be able to get it back, as it's not included in the Fedora Core Legacy RPMs. At least, I never saw it. But, I went ahead, crossed my fingures, and deleted the old mplayer RPMs, then installed all of the others in one go:

$ rpm -ivh mplayer*.rpm

And it works. I can view the video.

Unfortunately, it's not very good.