[MPlayer-users] Compiling MPlayer fails

[The Wanderer]

Gianluca Fiore wrote:

> On Wed 28 Feb, 2007 at 07:18:54 -0500, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> Gianluca Fiore wrote:
>> 
>>> May I ask why this kind of behaviour? I'm a long time cvs/svn
>>> mplayer user and for many years enabling options from the
>>> configure script was *ok*. Now why isn't so anymore?
>> 
>> In MPlayer's configure script, '--enable' means "do not perform any
>> autodetection; assume that everything necessary for this feature
>> is present, including all necessary special compiler options". If
>> you use it, you need to explicitly specify include directories and
>> linker flags via the appropriate configure options.
>> 
>> This is not a change; it has been the case for quite literally as
>> long as I have been following MPlayer development (i.e. since the
>> 0.90 release series), although for some while in the "early" years
>> it was not consistent across the entirety of configure (and in some
>> places it may still not be).
>> 
>> If it "worked" for you before, that was a coincidence; all of your
>> necessary header files and libraries happened to be in places where
>> MPlayer (and/or the compiler) knew to look for them by default,
>> and no specific linker flags were necessary.
>> 
>> Personally, I find it a little implausible that MPlayer was ever
>> able to find the XviD libraries with no linker options (i.e.
>> '-lxvidcore'), but I have no particular reason to accuse you of
>> lying about it.
> 
> I've been using these options to configure for a long time (around a
> year) without any problem, until two weeks ago when it stopped the
> compiling with the error reported in my first message. Removing
> "--enable-xvid" did resolve the problem, as you suggested me to do.
> 
>   --prefix=/usr --enable-gui --disable-arts --disable-smb \
>   --enable-sdl --enable-x11 --enable-theora --confdir=/etc/mplayer \
>   --win32codecsdir=/usr/lib/win32 --enable-faad-external --enable-menu \
>   --enable-tv-v4l1 --enable-tv-v4l2 --enable-largefiles --enable-xvid
> 
> It may be implausible to you, but this worked for me for so long that
> I thought it was a "correct" way to compile MPlayer. Should I
> consider myself very lucky to got it working even when it shouldn't?
> :-)

Extraordinarily so - possibly supernaturally so.

If you could obtain a copy of the older version which did work for you
with this configure line, I would be at least mildly interested to see
both what version (revision) it was and what the generated compiler
command line for compiling the XviD-dependent files was. ("Two weeks
ago", unfortunately, is a little bit too imprecise to narrow down an
exact revision.)

> So, at the end of the day, would be more "correct" to use only the
> first line (the prefix, disables and gui options)?

The options which I believe will not be autodetected to the settings you
seem to be requesting there are:

--prefix
--enable-gui
--disable-arts
--disable-smb
--win32codecsdir
--enable-menu
--enable-largefiles

For future reference, simply examine the output of 'configure --help';
any options marked as "[autodetect]" should not need to have --enable
explicitly specified, and indeed in most cases should fail to work with
--enable unless other options are explicitly specified.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.