Greetings to all...

How do you get media players like Xine and Mplayer to utilize an install of Xvid 1.0?

I have a number of self-coded movies using Xvid with the 'b-frames' option, which causes jerky playback when decoded with the other mpeg-4 compatible codecs my OS (Mandrake 10.0 official) comes with. I've done the 'configure/make/make install' procedure with the tarball with no errors, I just can't seem to get any of the media players to actually choose Xvid 1.0 for decoding, instead of the other Mpeg-4 compatible codecs. Should I be installing Xvid 1.0 to a specific folder that Xine, Mplayer, etc. will find?

Thanks for reading!

Dave

You don't particularly need XviD itself, unless you're doing encoding. For decoding, what you need are the codecs, but it looks like you have to install XviD to get them (though mPlayer says that their codec plays XviD just fine, which is what I've found).

In any case, instructions for installing XviD so that it will work with mPlayer (and presumably also Xine) can be found on this mPlayer documentation page.

Hope this helps.

motub,

The codecs that come with Mplayer do seem to play older Xvid files just fine. They just don't properly decode the b-frames that are present in AVIs made with more recent versions of Xvid, hence my need to install the current version. B-frames cause a jerky 'stutter' effect when played back via a codec with no support for that function. It's a commonly-discussed issue in Windows (decoding Xvid with a 'b-frame unfriendly' codec), but I haven't seen much written about it in Linux yet.

Thank you for pointing out the Mplayer doc link...lots of good info there that I'll read more carefully later today when I've managed some sleep! You've given me a good starting point.

Dave

it's a compile time option to use xvid for decoding instead of ffmpeg. i forgot how i've done it before. i had a mplayer for a while that used xvid for playing. i think it is anyway. you might can get it to go with messing with /usr/share/mplayer/codecs.conf.