# Installation

A quick installation guide can be found in the `README` file. Please read it first and then come back here for the rest of the gory details.

In this section you will be guided through the compilation and configuration process of MPlayer. It's not easy, but it won't necessarily be hard. If you experience a behavior different from this description, please search through this documentation and you'll find your answers.

## Software requirements

- POSIX system - You need a POSIX-compatible shell and POSIX-compatible system tools like grep, sed, awk, etc. in your path.

- GNU make 3.81 or later

- binutils - GNU binutils 2.11 or later is known to work.

- compiler - We mostly use gcc, the recommended versions on x86 are 2.95 and 3.4+. On PowerPC, use 4.x+. icc 10.1+ is also known to work.

- Xorg/XFree86 - recommended version is 4.3 or later. Make sure the development packages are installed, too, otherwise it won't work. You don't absolutely need X, some video output drivers work without it.

- FreeType - 2.0.9 or later is required for the OSD and subtitles

- ALSA - optional, for ALSA audio output support. At least 0.9.0rc4 is required.

- libjpeg - required for the optional JPEG video output driver

- libpng - required for the optional PNG video output driver

- directfb - optional, 0.9.22 or later required for the directfb/dfbmga video output drivers

- lame - 3.98.3 or later, necessary for encoding MP3 audio with MEncoder

- zlib - recommended, many codecs use it.

- LIVE555 Streaming Media - optional, needed for some RTSP/RTP streams

- cdparanoia - optional, for CDDA support

- libxmms - optional, for XMMS input plugin support. At least 1.2.7 is required.

- libsmb - optional, for SMB networking support

- libmad - optional, for fast integer-only MP3 decoding on FPU-less platforms

## Features

- Decide if you need GUI. If you do, see the GUI section before compiling.

- If you want to install MEncoder (our great all-purpose encoder), see the MEncoder section.

- If you have a V4L compatible TV tuner card, and wish to watch/grab and encode movies with MPlayer, read the TV input section.

- If you have a V4L compatible radio tuner card, and wish to listen and capture sound with MPlayer, read the radio section.

- There is a neat OSD Menu support ready to be used. Check the OSD menu section.

Then build MPlayer:

    ./configure
    make
    make install

At this point, MPlayer is ready to use. Check if you have a `codecs.conf` file in your home directory at (`~/.mplayer/codecs.conf`) left from old MPlayer versions. If you find one, remove it.

Debian users can build a .deb package for themselves, it's very simple. Just exec

    fakeroot debian/rules binary

in MPlayer's root directory. See Debian packaging for detailed instructions.

Always browse the output of `./configure`, and the `config.log` file, they contain information about what will be built, and what will not. You may also want to view `config.h` and `config.mak` files. If you have some libraries installed, but not detected by `./configure`, then check if you also have the proper header files (usually the -dev packages) and their version matches. The `config.log` file usually tells you what is missing.

Though not mandatory, the fonts should be installed in order to gain OSD, and subtitle functionality. The recommended method is installing a TTF font file and telling MPlayer to use it. See the Subtitles and OSD section for details.

## What about the GUI?

The GUI needs GTK 1.2.x or GTK 2.0 (it isn't fully GTK, but the panels are), so GTK (and the devel stuff, usually called gtk-dev) has to be installed. You can build it by specifying `--enable-gui` during `./configure`. Then, to turn on GUI mode, you have to execute the `gmplayer` binary.

In order to use the GUI in a comfortable way and as intended, you are strongly advised to install a skin. See Skins at the download page. A skin should be extracted to the usual system-wide directory `$PREFIX/share/mplayer/skins` or to the user specific directory `$HOME/.mplayer/skins` and resides as a subdirectory there. MPlayer by default first looks in the user specific directory, then the system-wide directory for a subdirectory named `default` (which simply can be a link to your favourite skin) to load the skin, but you can use the `-skin myskin` option, or the `skin=myskin` or `gui_skin=myskin` config file directives, or the skin browser to use a different skin from the `skins` directories.

## Fonts and OSD

You need to tell MPlayer which font to use to enjoy OSD and subtitles. Any TrueType font or special bitmap fonts will work. However, TrueType fonts are recommended as they look far better, can be properly scaled to the movie size and cope better with different encodings.

### TrueType fonts

There are two ways to get TrueType fonts to work. The first is to pass the `-font` option to specify a TrueType font file on the command line. This option will be a good candidate to put in your configuration file (see the manual page for details). The second is to create a symlink called `subfont.ttf` to the font file of your choice. Either

    ln -s /path/to/sample_font.ttf ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf

for each user individually or a system-wide one:

    ln -s /path/to/sample_font.ttf $PREFIX/share/mplayer/subfont.ttf

If MPlayer was compiled with fontconfig support, the above methods won't work, instead `-font` expects a fontconfig font name and defaults to the sans-serif font. Example:

    mplayer -font 'Bitstream Vera Sans' anime.mkv

To get a list of fonts known to fontconfig, use `fc-list`.

### bitmap fonts

If for some reason you wish or need to employ bitmap fonts, download a set from our homepage. You can choose between various ISO fonts and some sets of fonts contributed by users in various encodings.

Uncompress the file you downloaded to `~/.mplayer` or `$PREFIX/share/mplayer`. Then rename or symlink one of the extracted directories to `font`, for example:

    ln -s ~/.mplayer/arial-24 ~/.mplayer/font

    ln -s $PREFIX/share/mplayer/arial-24 $PREFIX/share/mplayer/font

Fonts should have an appropriate `font.desc` file which maps Unicode font positions to the actual code page of the subtitle text. Another solution is to have UTF-8-encoded subtitles and use the `-utf8` option or give the subtitles file the same name as your video file with a `.utf` extension and have it in the same directory as the video file.

### OSD menu

MPlayer has a completely user-definable OSD Menu interface.

the Preferences menu is currently UNIMPLEMENTED!

#### Installation

1. compile MPlayer by passing the `--enable-menu` to `./configure`

2. make sure you have an OSD font installed

3. copy `etc/menu.conf` to your `.mplayer` directory

4. copy `etc/input.conf` to your `.mplayer` directory, or to the system-wide MPlayer config dir (default: `/usr/local/etc/mplayer`)

5. check and edit `input.conf` to enable menu movement keys (it is described there).

6. start MPlayer by the following example:

       mplayer -menu file.avi

7. push any menu key you defined

## Codec installation

### Xvid

Xvid is a free software MPEG-4 ASP compliant video codec. Note that Xvid is not necessary to decode Xvid-encoded video. libavcodec is used by default as it offers better speed.

#### Installing Xvid

Like most open source software, it is available in two flavors: official releases and the CVS version. The CVS version is usually stable enough to use, as most of the time it features fixes for bugs that exist in releases. Here is what to do to make Xvid CVS work with MEncoder:

1.     cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.xvid.org:/xvid login

2.     cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.xvid.org:/xvid co xvidcore

3.     cd xvidcore/build/generic

4.     ./bootstrap.sh && ./configure

   You may have to add some options (examine the output of `./configure --help`).

5.     make && make install

6. Recompile MPlayer.

### x264

x264 is a library for creating H.264 video. MPlayer sources are updated whenever an x264 API change occurs, so it is always suggested to use MPlayer from Subversion.

If you have a GIT client installed, the latest x264 sources can be gotten with this command:

    git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git

Then build and install in the standard way:

    ./configure && make && make install

Now rerun `./configure` for MPlayer to pick up x264 support.

### AMR

MPlayer can use the OpenCORE AMR libraries through FFmpeg. Download the libraries for AMR-NB and AMR-WB from the opencore-amr project and install them according to the instructions on that page.

### XMMS

MPlayer can use XMMS input plugins to play many file formats. There are plugins for SNES game tunes, SID tunes (from Commodore 64), many Amiga formats, .xm, .it, VQF, Musepack, Bonk, shorten and many others. You can find them at the XMMS input plugin page.

For this feature you need to have XMMS and compile MPlayer with `./configure --enable-xmms`.

## RTC

There are three timing methods in MPlayer.

- To use the old method, you don't have to do anything. It uses usleep() to tune A/V sync, with +/- 10ms accuracy. However sometimes the sync has to be tuned even finer.

- The new timer code uses the RTC (RealTime Clock) for this task, because it has precise 1ms timers. The `-rtc` option enables it, but a properly set up kernel is required. If you are running kernel 2.4.19pre8 or later you can adjust the maximum RTC frequency for normal users through the /proc file system. Use one of the following two commands to enable RTC for normal users:

      echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq

      sysctl dev/rtc/max-user-freq=1024

  You can make this setting permanent by adding the latter to `/etc/sysctl.conf`.

  You can see the new timer's efficiency in the status line. The power management functions of some notebook BIOSes with speedstep CPUs interact badly with RTC. Audio and video may get out of sync. Plugging the external power connector in before you power up your notebook seems to help. In some hardware combinations (confirmed during usage of non-DMA DVD drive on an ALi1541 board) usage of the RTC timer causes skippy playback. It's recommended to use the third method in these cases.

- The third timer code is turned on with the `-softsleep` option. It has the efficiency of the RTC, but it doesn't use RTC. On the other hand, it requires more CPU.