Most of these demuxers and decoders are provided in better form by
libav, while the mplayer builtin ones are essentially unmaintained. The
only legimitate use case for not using the libav ones was working around
libav bugs or bugs related to the way mplayer uses libav. Instead of
trying to keep dead code alive, development effort should go into
improving libav or the mplayer libav glue code.
Note that the libav demuxer have been preferred over the mplayer builtin
ones for a while in mplayer2. There were some exceptions: playing DVDs
with dvdnav or playing network sources. (That's because some stream
modules and network.c requested explicit file formats, such as
DEMUXER_TYPE_MPEG_PS, which mapped to builtin demuxers.) With this
commit, they are switched to use libav. One caveat is that the requested
format is not passed to libavformat, instead we rely on the auto probing
to select the correct libav demuxer (see code in demux_open_stream()).
Compiling with full features requires development files for several
external libraries. Below is a list of some important requirements. For
more information see the output of './configure --help' for a list of options,
or look at the list of enabled and disabled features printed after running
'./configure'. If you think you have support for some feature installed
but configure fails to detect it, the file config.log may contain information
about the reasons for the failure.
Libraries specific to particular video output methods
(you'll want at least one of VDPAU, GL or Xv):
- libvdpau (for VDPAU output, best choice for NVIDIA cards)
- libGL (OpenGL output)
- libXv (XVideo output)
general:
- libasound (ALSA audio output)
- various general X development libraries
- libfreetype (for libass)
- libfontconfig (for libass)
- libass
- FFmpeg libraries (libavutil libavcodec libavformat libswscale libpostproc)
Most of the above libraries are available in suitable versions on normal
Linux distributions. However FFmpeg is an exception (distro versions may be
too old to work at all or work well). For that reason you may want to use
the separately available build wrapper that first compiles FFmpeg libraries
and libass, and then compiles the player statically linked against those.