RH9 and gmplayer

[dishawjp]

Hi All,

On my RH8 install I have a program called "gmplayer" which allows it to play, among other things, CD's with .avi files on them. Actually they are movies recorded on CD's.

During her Christmas break, my younger daughter downloaded and installed this program in RH8. She uses it to play her movies on my Linux box. She doesn't remember where she downloaded it from and I've tried freshrpms.net, apt-get install gmplayer, synaptic, and a google search to locate the rpm to install it; all with no luck.

The reason this is so important to me is that she wants me to set up her WinXP box as a dual boot with RH9 and I want to be sure that she can get the full functionality from the Linux install. Actually I hope that by this time next year, she'll let me wipe the WinXP install

Ummmm... I know that this program may not always be used for totally legal purposes, and would appreciate responses in which the lectures are at least accompanied by assistance

Jim

[Void Main]

# apt-get install mplayer

gmplayer is part of the mplayer package. If you must compile from source I believe the configure option is "--enable-gui" if memory serves...

[dishawjp]

Wow!! That was FAST!!

Thanks Voidmain,

I'm getting it now

Jim

[Calum]

hey, just out of interest, what processor speed and bus speed does your computer have, dishawjp. I am currently wrestling with my celery 700 trying to get a usable version of mplayer going.

[dishawjp]

Hi Calum,

hey, just out of interest, what processor speed and bus speed does your computer have, dishawjp. I am currently wrestling with my celery 700 trying to get a usable version of mplayer going.

This is my newest computer; I just put it together last December. It has an Asus motherboard with (I think) a 266 MHz bus speed and the processor is a P4 2.4 GHz. The thing I cheaped out on was the RAM, I only put 256 MB in, but I'll be changing that as soon as I can set a few bucks aside. My wife wasn't too proud of me a couple of weeks ago when I brought home another 40 GB hard drive for it so I could set up a dual boot with RH8 and RH9.

Mplayer runs perfectly on it, but this is the only hardware I've tried to run mplayer on. Good luck.

HTH,

Jim

[Calum]

blurgh my best and only computer has a celery 700Mhz CPU, 128MB of RAM and a 128Mhz bus speed. could be worse, but not by much these days...

i'll just keep plugging away despite those pesky 'your computer is too slow' messages i keep getting from mplayer!

[dishawjp]

Hey Calum,

I really don't know if the bottle neck would be CPU and bus speed or if more RAM would help. I put a Celeron 500 MHz w/192 MB of RAM for my oldest daughter with RH8 and it seems to handle mplayer. At least I can say for sure that she does take .avi CD's from my younger daughter and says she uses them on her computer and she doesn't complain about performance. To be honest I've never watched mplayer on her computer... It may be pretty bad.

RAM is getting to be damned reasonable, with 256 DIMM's available for under $30. Less than a tank of gas

Just a thought.

Jim

[Calum]

i might think about that right enough, i do have a spare slot i think, my slowdowns seem to get worse when playing mov files, while mpegs are a little more bearable, so perhaps it is a codec issue also (but not exclusively i should imagine, what with this awful performance). Well, RAM might well be on the shopping list then!

[dishawjp]

The format that my both daughters use is .avi. I really don't know enough about this topic to know which are better formats for slower machines, but the .avi formats do run very well on my computer and you may want to give them a try.

Jim

[Calum]

well, .avi files are not an actual format as such.
they are a microsoft video file type that microsoft have stopped endorsing now in favour of wmv and wma, which they say give better quality to filesize ratios (and better opportunities for spyware, but they don't say that).

An avi file is simply a movie (usually, but not always, containing both a sound stream and a video stream) file, where the video stream and audio streams can be encoded using any codec, they then get "wrapped" up in one avi file, if you like, and the person playing the file must use a video player which can use the relevant codecs to play the file. I think the quicktime .mov format works in a similar way, but .movs are a black box to me so i don't know.

Either way, with .avi files, the thing is that you never know which codecs you are going to require until you try to play it. sometimes the website you get it from will helpfully tell you what you need, and usually nowadays most movie players know they have to have certain codecs, so it's largely transparent. One popular format nowadays for .avi files is to encode the video using DivX4 or 5 and the audio using mp3 codecs, but even the DivX codecs are kind of not really compatible across versions and it's all a little hairy when you get down to it.

Nevertheless, i do find mplayer plays .avi files pretty well most of the time. I still get that message about 'your computer is too slow to play this' though... So what i try to do is just run mplayer with no gui, giving it the "-vm" and "-framedrop" options.