As you might have seen in some of the screenshots, I run mplayer against the framebuffer on my Thinkpad, scrunched into a slot that takes up half the available 800 pixels, and usually from within a screen-vs session.
If it’s vaguely interesting to you, or if you also want to smush DVD rips against the framebuffer of an 8-year-old laptop, you might be interested in the flags I use to build mplayer. Most of these come from the mplayer-no-gui PKGBUILD in AUR (which has since been purged out, I should mention), although I have adjusted it even further to carve out even less dependencies, and reduce the time it takes to build.
And even if you’re not interested at all and you think I’m a hopeless lunatic … well, I get tired of keeping the flags in hnb, so I’m dumping them here.
./configure --prefix=/usr \ --mandir=/usr/man \ --win32codecsdir=/usr/lib/win32 \ --disable-mencoder \ --disable-x11 \ --disable-gl \ --disable-tv-v4l1 \ --disable-tv-v4l2 \ --disable-runtime-cpudetection \ --enable-largefiles \ --disable-gui \ --disable-nas \ --disable-mga \ --disable-smb \ --disable-arts \ --disable-openal \ --disable-sdl \ --disable-aa \ --disable-esd \ --disable-jack \ --enable-fbdev \ --disable-lirc \ --disable-lircc \ --disable-liblzo \ --disable-fribidi \ --disable-libdv \ --disable-musepack \ --disable-speex \ --disable-cdparanoia \ --disable-dvdnav \ --disable-libamr_nb \ --disable-live \ --disable-mad
Insert that into your Pkgfile (for Crux) or your PKGBUILD (for Arch) or just your ./configure command, and it should spit back out a leaner, meaner mplayer. (Please note that this is written for Crux, so it might need a little smacking around to make it work with your distribution. Be prepared to fight for your freedom.)
And so, once again, this blog does the thing it was originally intended for: keeping a record of all the little weird things I do.
Motho ke motho ka botho 
Funny thing is though, those little weird things you do are really helpful for others.
Odd you would pick now to put these up on display, I’ve been fiddling with MPlayer configuration lately in an effort to play movies fullscreen on my netbook with smooth performance. I don’t enable win32 codecs though, I don’t really need them.
And if I do, well, I still have Arch’s default MPlayer installed. 🙂
Forgive my ignorance Mister Mandla. I’ve read up on the framebuffer but I’ve no idea how to run video in Puppy Linux without X. Is it possible?
Also, I have elinks installed but can’t find the right file to change the string. It doesn’t seem to be in the .elinks directory. Should it be?
It’s only when I read blogs like yours that I remember I’m not a true computer geek, though most of my colleagues think I am 🙂
To be honest, I don’t use Puppy Linux enough to know how it’s done. You’ll have to scout out an answer on the Puppy forums, and see what advice they offer. If it comes to recompiling MPlayer, you could try these flags. Be aware that they’ll probably need some fine tuning to work with Puppy. 😉
Understood 🙂 Keep up the good work, you nutter 🙂
@ samspade:
Same here- If I talk to real IT professionals, or just people yho know more than me, of which there are many. Then I feel really humbled. But somehow I look like a pro for anybody else. Probably it is just because I use a different OS (GNU/Linux) than the rest.
GNU/Linux can look very unfamilliar to those who have only seen Windows for the last 10 to 15 years.
Looking at these configuration options for MPlayer again has led me to wonder which audio system (straight ALSA, pulseaudio, esd, jack, etc.) is most efficient for older systems in terms of standalone performance vs efficiency of being used by lightweight programs….
Any thoughts, O great and wise K. Mandla? 😛 😈
Pingback: GoblinX Project » GoblinX Newsletter, Issue 228 (11/29/2009)
Pingback: Martes sin X “Mplayer” « Seamos realistas…
Pingback: vlc, ncurses and the framebuffer … ? « Motho ke motho ka botho
Pingback: A quick look at framebuffer applications « Motho ke motho ka botho
Dear K.
I’ve sceen how you have mplayer running in screen, however, I can’t seem to get screen to
let any framebuffer access hapen from within it… any hints?
-LM
I got it to work a lot easier on my slackware bux 🙂 I simply collected the source package looked at the readme realizing I could just compile tried compiling and just supply -vo svga -ao alsa however I need to be root which is not optimal but it works 😉
Now I just need to get the support into screen 🙂
Perhaps using a more simplicistic approach
I have tryied to attain a similar goal .
In
http://www.webalice.it/fabiocolitti/c-mpv.htm
http://www.webalice.it/fabiocolitti/C-MPV_menu_.zip
there is an ugly bunch of minimal bash files
for using MPlayer in Console
in playing videos (fbdev or sdl)
_ N O T only ascii movies _ .
I’ve simply assembled like lego bricks
some useful options for MPlayer
and some scripts .
Download C-MPV_menu_.zip ,
edit and adapt the scripts to your hardware and taste .
Hope this can be helpful in some manner .
Be merciful with my errors ….
regards
Fabio Colitti
Hi Fabio! I’ll give these a try. Thanks!
Pingback: mplayer and screen, in a fight to the death « Motho ke motho ka botho