gMPlayer doesn't list the right vo drivers; how can I add them?
 

Hello, everybody.

I've been using MPlayer for a while now, with the openGL drivers for the vo device. Just recently after doing some heavy system maintainance (breaking and fixing things...), mplayer (and gmplayer) started playing -extremely- choppily while using the openGL drivers. The X11 driver plays it almost OK, but ofsets the audio from the video so much that it's hardly worth watching. XVideo apparently doesn't work with my video card (ATI Radeon 9600 XT with ATI's proprietary drivers). I've heard that the Gatos drivers can help ATI cards with this, but unless somebody can recommend them specifically for this card (based on experience), I'm not going to mess up my current setup trying to get them to work.

But there is hope: Video seems to run well with the SDL drivers. The only problem is that I can't get the option to appear in mplayer's GUI (gMPlayer). With a lot of things I wouldn't mind using the command line, but having to textually hunt down a file and then enter a convoluted string to play it every time I want to watch a video just doesn't sounds too fun.

If anybody knows how to:

A) Get things running smoothly using the openGL drivers
B) Get the XVideo drivers to work, or
C) Add SDL to the option list in gMPlayer,

I would love to hear from you!

Thanks for your help in advance!

--Dane

just compile it from source. MPlayer will include in all the video outputs it can find. and when you run ./configure you will end with a summary of which video outputs will be enabled or disabled. just ensure all the SDL libraries and headers are installed and compile mplayer.

Hi, acid.

I just did a recompile on it and no dice. It lists them all when I do "mplayer -vo help", which it says it wouldn't do if they weren't installed, but when I go into gMPlayer it doesn't give me the option to use SDL. OpenGL still doesn't work in MPlayer, but it does fine in everything else (screen savers, etc). So far the only things I have listed in the gMPlayer menu are xv, X11, gl2, and xvidix. Xv and xvidix don't work at all.

Thanks for the quick reply!
Further ideas will be well-appreciated.

--Dane

I did some more fiddling and found solutions to a couple of the problems mentioned above: XVideo now works, and OpenGL mostly works (watchable while windowed but utterly useless at full screen). I also got the new ATI drivers working.

First I downloaded the latest version of xorg--6.8.1--and compiled and installed it while X was running, according to the directions given in the "BUILD" file. Next I removed the old ATI drivers using pkgtool and cleaned up by typing "rm -vfr /lib/modules/fglrx". Then I installed the new drivers by doing:

Note: "$" represents a normal user prompt; "#" represents a root prompt. Also note: if this your first time installing the drivers, be sure to add the line "modprobe fglrx" to the end of rc.modules.

After doing this I found that "startx" caused X to crash complaining about keyboard stuff. To fix this, I went into /etc/X11/xorg.conf and changed the lines:

To:

(Note the lowercase "k" in the "Driver" line.)

Finally, in order to get POSIX shared memory to work (and thus allowing antialiasing, etc.), I added the following line into my /etc/fstab:

And mounted it by typing "mount /dev/shm". You can check to see if this worked by typing "mount | grep shm".

I hope this helps somebody else who's having the same problems.

Still, if anybody can help me get OpenGL working nicely at full screen like it used to, I would be very grateful...and the original question remains: How can I add video modes to the GUI?

Have a good one.

--Dane