Monday, July 11, 2011

A Newish mplayer Build For PPC and Tiger

So you may still be having nightmares at my previous post on mplayer (I know, it was as rambling as a terrorist manifesto), and you may remember I was using an mplayer binary from 2006 and I threw in some big talk about how I was gonna compile my own to bring it up to date. Well, someone else saved me the trouble. Sort of. This site has made available a GUI wrapper for mplayer, and, well, I'll let them explain it:
This is simply the MPlayer binary wrapped inside a MacOS X application bundle, allowing for drag and drop, file association and opening videofiles directly from the Finder. It is based on the application bundle from MPlayerOSX and the mplayer binary compiled from SVN@mplaerhq.hu (09.09.2009):

svn co -r29662 svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

This adaptation allows simple functionality like drag and drop, "Open with", file associations and opening of the MPlayer program without a graphical user interface. The mplayer binary itself provides with 300 video codecs and 141 audio codecs, the ability to open a wide range of movie files, streaming protocols dvd disks. In addition to the usual mplayer keyboard commands, there is support for the Apple remote.
The application comes with a bunch of configuration files that you edit manually, but since that requires a learning curve of, oh, about 5 minutes and I already know how to use mplayer from the commandline, I just extracted the binary file from the app package and used it in the Terminal. So now I have an mplayer binary from September, 2009. Not 2011 current, but it does much better decoding newer AVC files the 2006 version choked on.

So download it and use the GUI wrapper or whatever. I think you'll be pleased with the performance.

2 comments:

  1. I've tried this and its a great improvement over the older mplayer but nothing and I mean nothing compares with Coreplayer. I live my life by certain rules and I don't typically pay for sex or software, but Coreplayer is totally worth the twenty bucks. I can start a download a 720p file of Florence and the Machine in mactubes and play it full screen in all its HD glory a minute later. Can't say that about any other program I've tried.


    Don't know if you've caught it but in Tenfourfox beta 6 you can now play some html 5 content in quicktime with a simple xpi file that Oberstleutant Kaiser has come up with. Its super beta but I can confirm it works. If you set the user agent to ipad many sites that are set up to stream html 5 content to an ipad will work with this little haxie as well. Youtube doesn't work, but we still have Youview and Mactubes for PPC so I don't care, I bet Kaiser will fix it for youtube as well.

    I enjoy your blog almost more than any other I read. A) It's hilarious, B) you are helping keep this ol G4 ibook going in the mo-dern age. My only complaint is that you don't post more. Sure I have dell latitude d620 with linux mint 10 on it, but this ibook has the last twenty years of my computing history on it, I will endeavour keep it going as long as I possibly can.

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  2. Yeah, but Coreplayer doesn't require work.

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