MPlayer is one of my favorite media players. It is used with a frontend like smplayer, gnome-mplayer and MPlayerGUI to provide a good alternative to Windows Media Player. Although there are already several Win32 builds of MPlayer on the net, I like to build MPlayer on my own using MinGW compiler because I want to optimize my build for my CPU. So I installed MinGW and compiled MPlayer as follows.
Build ffmpeg statically or dynamically as shown in this post.
- (Optional) Compile the lzo library:
./configure --prefix=/mingw && make && make install
(Optional) Fribidi is a rendering library for right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew. If you are a speaker of such right-to-left languages, compile fribidi statically as shown below:
./configure --prefix=/mingw --disable-shared --disable-debug
make
make installMore information can be found here.
- Download JPEG source from ijg.org and complie JPEG:
./configure --prefix=/mingw --enable-static
make
make install - Compile libPNG:
./configure --prefix=/mingw --disable-shared
make
make install - Compile libiconv, Freetype, expat and fontconfig statically in that order:
./configure --prefix=/mingw --disable-shared
make install - Compile libdca:
./configure --prefix=/mingw
make
make install - (Optional) Download DirectX headers from any of the following locations and unpack them in /mingw/include:
- http://www.videolan.org/vlc/dx7headers.tgz
- http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/contrib/win32/dx7headers.tgz
- http://www.videolan.org/vlc/dx7headers.tgz
- Download the latest mplayer source (mplayer-export-snapshot.tar.bz2) and unpack it. (patch 1 and patch 2)
tar xjvf mplayer-export-snapshot.tar.bz2
cd mplayer-export-2010-02-07/Then, run
./configure:CPPFLAGS='-DFRIBIDI_ENTRY="" ' ./configure --prefix=/mingw --enable-runtime-cpudetection --enable-static --enable-theora --enable-fribidi --disable-ffmpeg_a --disable-gl --disable-vidix --yasm=/mingw/bin/yasm --extra-libs='-lfribidi'
The CPPFLAGS value allows fribidi to be linked statically.
- Build Mplayer:
make
After successful build, strip the executables:
strip m*.exe
Optionally, compress the executables with upx:
upx --best --strip-relocs=0 mplayer.exe
upx --best --strip-relocs=0 mencoder.exe Download MPlayer codecs from here. The MPlayer codecs for Windows platform has a filename like windows-essential-20071007.zip. Extract the codecs package and you'll get a folder "windows-essential-20071007". Rename it as "codecs" and move the "codecs" folder inside where mplayer.exe file is located.
Make sure that HOME environment variable is set to your personal folder(for example, C:\Users\Jocelyn). Upon the first run of mplayer, a new folder named
mplayerwill be created in your HOME folder. Copy codecs.conf to themplayerfolder. The "config" file stores default options for playing movie files. Open the "config" file and make changes as follows:# Write your default config options here!
cdrom-device=D:
dvd-device=D:
ao=dsound
vo=direct3d
font=C:\WINDOWS\FONTS\MALGUN.TTF
framedrop=yes
subcp=cp949
My win32 build of mplayer can be downloaded from here. It is recommended that the zip archive should be extracted in C:\Program Files.
Running MPlayer
Now, let's try mplayer. First, get a movie file ready. In the Command Prompt, type a command in the following form:
mplayer mymoviefile.avi
Alternatively,
mplayer -vo direct3d -ao win32 -font C:\WINDOWS\FONTS\Tahoma.ttf -framedrop mymoviefile.avi
A new window will pop up with the movie playing inside it.
The next step is to get and set up SMPlayer.
