Re: divx

[John Duff <jfduff@xxxxxxx>]

> 
> * tim savage (twsavage@xxxxxxx) wrote:
> > i recently got completely rid of windows, and i'm getting kind of tired not 
> > being able to watch my burned cd's of divx. movies.  i looked around, and all 
> > of the players i found don't work well or at all with divx or dvds.  does 
> > anyone know of any players that will work with reading divx in linux?
> 
> Actually I just set up my linux box to read Windows divx format. I am
> using mplayer with all the win32 .dll's. I have the win32 dll's in
> /usr/lib/win32. I also use sdl for sound and output. 
> 
> I also have xmps which supports the OpenDivx format. XMPS is also
> supposed to be able to support win32 divx with the same .dll's but I
> cannot get it to work.
> 
> You can find the win32 codecs on my website
> calvin.resnet.mtu.edu/divx with 
> username: lug 
> password: L!nuxr0ck$
> 
> Steven Isaacson <spisaacs@xxxxxxx> http://www.csl.mtu.edu/~spisaacs/
> 

I too have spent some time trying to figure out the best app to play movies
on my linux system.  I tried xanim, plaympeg, etc.  Then I found mplayer. 
This is far and away the best movie player for linux, as far as I know.

Here's a blurb from the docs for mplayer:

MPlayer is a movie player for LINUX (though it runs on most Unices, and even on 
non-x86 architectures). It plays most MPEG, AVI and ASF files (also some QT/MOV 
files, with CVID, VP31 video, and raw audio), supported by many native and 
win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VCD, DVD and even DivX movies too. The another 
big feature of mplayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works 
with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, but you can use SDL (and this way 
all drivers of SDL) and some lowlevel card-specific drivers (for 
Matrox/3dfx/SiS) too! Most of them supports software or hardware scaling, so 
you can enjoy movies in fullscreen.


I highly recommend it, I have not yet encountered a movie file it couldn't 
play, and it doesn't core dump either, if a movie file contains errors it
just skips over them.  Caveat: It requires gcc 2.95.{2-4}.  I am running
a redhat 6.2-based system (which has gcc 2.91.66), so I had to first download
and install gcc 2.95.3 to compile mplayer.  For those of you using redhat 7.x,
you have gcc 2.96.x, which you *cannot* use to compile mplayer.
(do a "gcc --version" to see which version you have, egcs is another name for
gcc).  So the compilation and installation of mplayer is not trivial, but
not too big a deal.  Once you invest the time to get it up and running
(which will undoubtedly be educational), I guarantee you will find it 
time well spent.  I would be happy to help you as well.

mplayer:
http://www.MPlayerHQ.hu/homepage/

gcc:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/gcc.html

-John