[MPlayer-users] GUI or not GUI

[Vladimir Mosgalin]

On 27 Dec 2002, Giovanni Fassina wrote:

GF>I'm a new user of MPlayer and I am very very satisfied by this product.
GF>I have an ATI radeon card so I'd like to use the driver xvidix, that
GF>provides better speed and hardware acceleration of most operations.
GF>But I have to start MPlayer as root or with root suid.... but gtk+
GF>refuses to start the program for security reasons... so I cannot use the
GF>gui if I want to use the xvidix driver (and also the DGA).

Well, of course using drivers that need root privileges isn't good
solution always, but if you wish so, there is workaround - sudo. Read
"man sudo sudoers" and configure it. You can also following config.

Let's say that user which should be able to run mplayer as root is
called "testuser". Then, write the following to /etc/sudoers:

testuser ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/mplayer, /usr/bin/gmplayer

(preferably edit config using "visudo" command).

Then, just run "sudo [g]mplayer" instead of [g]mplayer. I've got this in
my ~/.bashrc:
alias mplayer='sudo mplayer'
alias gmplayer='sudo gmplayer'

Now, never make [g]mplayer suid ;)

-- 

Vladimir