-----Original Message-----
From: owner-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Charles Moir
Sent: Sun 6/11/2006 9:48 AM
To: dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [XaraXtreme-dev] Re: mplayer binary
> Alex said :
> > .... though if you are happy with ogg, it's free,
> > and free in a manner such that even Debian are happy ( :-) ),
> > and is thus around by default on all modern distributions as
> > far as I know.
Just in case Alex isn't aware the format the movie is in, is h.264 for the
video and vorbis for the audio, wrapped in an ogg wrapper. I did try
theora for the video, but that had lousy quality at low bitrates.
> It's the ffmpeg codec we require, specifically the h.264 video codec
> part, that I'm more concerned about.
The chances are that if mplayer is installed the ffmpeg codecs will be enabled,
since ffmpeg is statically linked into mplayer and provides most of the formats
it can replay. There seems to be a very intimate relationship between the 2
projects, especially since ffmpeg svn is hosted on the mplayer server.
> I'm sort of surprised that worked out of the box for your distribution
> (Dapper is it?) or any distribution for that matter.
>
> Is there a way we can ensure specific codecs are installed? I sort of
> assumed the normal package dependency mechanisms would not work just for
> codecs, but perhaps that's wrong?
Mplayer doesn't use codec plugins like windows media does, instead it is
built with or without them. When we move to using wxMediaCtrl, we'll start
indirectly using gstreamer, which is plugin based. Certainly on Gentoo the
plugins are all separatly installable, but I suspect that just the ffmpeg
plugin (and maybe the vorbis plugin) would be enought to replay our movies.
> And when you say your default mplayer worked but he shipped one didn't,
> do you mean the platform provided mplayer worked (is it standard?) and
> the one we shipped did not?
I have compiled a version of mplayer that is not dependent on ncurses, which
should get one stage closer to an executable that is runnable on more
distributions. I can't produce a fully static mplayer executable since
selecting static disables all of the X based video output filters (so when
replaying the movie all the is produced is the audio).
Luke