codec location (was: Re: [MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] enable dll codec support for mingw32andcygwin)

[Diego Biurrun]

Sascha Sommer writes:
 > > Sascha Sommer writes:
 > >  > > Sascha Sommer wrote:
 > >  > > > realcodec.patch: fixes some problems with real dlls on Windows
 > >  > >
 > >  > > Does this actually work for you?  How?
 > >  >
 > >  > Make a subdir called codecs/ into the dir where your mplayer.exe is
 > >  > and copy the real dlls into it. It will also search other acm dshow and
 > vfw
 > >  > codecs there.
 > >  > I know this is not the best solution but real dlls are normally in
 > >  > Gemeinsame Dateien\Real\Codecs\ or Common Files\Real\codecs ?
 > >  > No way to find out their location runtime without too much bloat.
 > >
 > > Hmm, I don't think we should rely on working installations of QT/Real
 > > etc but use our own codecs as usual.  This is especially true for
 > > Cygwin.  There we have a Unix environment and I expect to configure my
 > > applications just like on any other Unix system.  I believe it would
 > > be best if we could make /usr/lib/win32/ work as usual under Cygwin.
 > > For MinGW the situation is slightly different as we create a real
 > > Windows application.  <path_to_mplayer>\codecs does not sound bad in
 > > this case.
 > >
 > 
 > Agreed, but on the other hand if they are there, why should we duplicate
 > hundreds of codecs? I got a message from rune today which says that we
 > can get the Common Files dir with the $COMMONPROGRAMFILES
 > environment variable. I had no time to check this yet, but maybe we could
 > let
 > configure search for real codecs in this path?

It's not that many codecs:

silver:/usr/src/mplayer/main/DOCS$ ls /usr/local/lib/real
drv3.so.6.0

This is with my RealPlayer 8.0.

How many people have RealPlayer actually installed, how many will have
it installed in the future?  I think we should settle for _one_ codec
location instead of several different ones.  IMHO all codecs should go
to /usr/lib/win32 or /usr/local/lib/win32 or at least we should check
this location by default for all codecs.  Having different directories
for win32, qt, real and xanim is a PITA IMHO.  You can always specify
separate directories via --with-xxxdir=/path/to/codec/xxx/.

Maybe the name is a bit misleading nowadays.  /usr/lib/codecs/ would
probably be better.  Maybe there is even an FHS dir for this, or maybe
there should be...

Comments?

Diego