| How to enable VESA in latest MPlayer releases |
| Written on Saturday, October 28, 2006 - 08:12 PM |
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How to enable VESA in latest MPlayer releases
After literally tearing my hair out on this, I can say I am pleased to announce that I have finally figured out how the heck one enables VESA output for MPlayer.
VESA output is very useful because it is very fast. For people like me with a horrible VIA C3 chip, anything fast is a boon - especially things like XVMC and VIDIX. Unfortunately, it seems VIDIX isn't working, but that seems to be more of a fault on the developer's part rather than mine. Besides, I've subscribed to the mailing list already.
Now, ever since MPlayer-1.0pre8 VESA has been unable to compile. On my last install of Ubuntu I figured out it was looking for a vbe.h (in configure.log, it appears ./configure tries to compile something with vbe.h). However, looking at the changelog, it also seems that they've switched the VESA interface. And here's the first rule of VESA in MPlayer:
1. It is most likely not your fault that VESA is not being detected in MPlayer-1.0pre8 and above (but was detected and compiled in on pre7, which unfortunately does not like gcc4). So don't try to troubleshoot your system. It's a library thing.
Looking at the changelog, it seems they've used something called vesautils. I have no idea what the hell they were switching for, but hey.
Here's what Googling for vesautils got me: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/vesautils/
Okay? Now here's what you do: ensure you have LRMI installed (low level interface to your hardware); for Gentoo it's a simple 'emerge lrmi'. Now, install subversion, because it's the only way to get the vesautils sources, apart from just clicking and saving everything (which takes a long time, and what if you want to update it?)
Now that you have subversion installed, we're getting down to the real meat. Execute
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/vesautils/trunk vesautils
and you should soon have a directory in your current folder called 'vesautils'. Notice this is just like CVS -d.... after all, subversion was created by the same guys as CVS, also for the same person. But I digress.
Now, change into the vesautils directory, ignore everything and just go on to the 'libvbe' directory inside.
Now, type in 'make', and press enter.
You should get something like this:
vbe.c:217: warning: 'print_str' defined but not used
vbe.c:227: warning: 'print_wrd' defined but not used
ar -rs libvbe.a vbe.o
ar: creating libvbe.a
cc -c -g -Wall -fPIC -o vbe.lo vbe.c
vbe.c: In function 'vbeGetControllerInfo':
vbe.c:255: warning: pointer targets in passing argument 1 of 'check_str' differ in signedness
vbe.c:283: warning: pointer targets in passing argument 1 of 'check_str' differ in signedness
vbe.c:295: warning: pointer targets in passing argument 1 of 'check_str' differ in signedness
vbe.c:307: warning: pointer targets in passing argument 1 of 'check_str' differ in signedness
vbe.c: At top level:
vbe.c:217: warning: 'print_str' defined but not used
vbe.c:227: warning: 'print_wrd' defined but not used
cc -g -Wall -Wl,-soname,libvbe.so.0 -fPIC -shared -o libvbe.so.0.2 vbe.lo
ln -sf libvbe.so.0.2 libvbe.so.0
ln -sf libvbe.so.0 libvbe.so |
Now you have it. Now run 'make install'. And now autodetecting VESA should work. At least, I only tried it on MPlayer-1.0rc1, not pre8.... who cares about pre8 now anyway.
(haha, imagine, I was so desperate I copied libvbe.a into my /usr/include directory, without the .so and symlinks. In the end, the .so files were the only ones that mattered, really.
Oh yes, and do keep track of what has been installed where. Your Linux distro might get messed up and you might have to delete the stuff you just installed, plus I don't think vesautils' Makefiles have a 'make uninstall' command in them. Just to be on the safe side.
And that's what part of the entire week was. Yeah, what a waste of time, no?
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