On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 5:34 PM, Scott Horowitz <stonecrest@gmail.com> wrote:

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On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 4:23 PM, Pierre Chapuis <catwell@archlinux.us> wrote:

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To me, the only way to use an up-to-date mplayer is to compile it yourself on your machine (by using one of the AUR packages).

Making a binary mplayer package is very difficult and the result can't be perfect for everybody because you have to make choices about what will be enabled in it (and add deps) and what will not (but some users might want it). It's the prototype of the package that should stay source-based if possible.

That may be so, but there are binary packages available. And while that is the case, they should be updated every so often. I mean, ffmpeg is almost 6 months old and it's tied to revision 14236 - the current revision is 16380! We are 2000 commits behind, it's astounding.

Not to mention I recently ran up into a bug where ffmpeg causes mpd to crash, and it's because the package is so out-dated. And there are other bug reports as well, dealing with other crashes and broken ogg support:

http://bugs.archlinux.org/index.php?string=ffmpeg&project=1

So the question remains, will these packages be updated anytime soon?

Back to your point about it being difficult to package - while I realize there are resource implications to this suggestion, I think the goal would be to have a couple different binary packages available to hit the most common uses, like is done with some other packages. I wouldn't throw up my hands and resort to compiling from source. Any idea how long it takes to compile mplayer on a p3? Trust me, it's not fun.

This is a valid point, and I do agree. The "problem" here is all the legwork with x264 and ffmpeg rebuilds... It's a lot of deps and a lot of them (avidemux comes to mind) just don't compile against newer versions.

If anyone is interested in speeding up this process, I would love some help with the following: a) Bump x264 to the latest version b) Bump ffmpeg to latest version c) Rebuild all deps for the above c') Patch apps that fail the build, and submit patches upstream d) Post an FR listing the versions used and which packages build fine, and which needs patches. Please attach the patches too.

It's a lot of work, and I'd love to be able to do it sooner, rather than later, but quite frankly, I have more pressing things to deal with at this juncture.

FYI, I've started the rebuilds. The packages will be in the testing repo sometime soon depending how well it goes and how busy I am. FTR, I'm using a svn snapshot dating from 20081220 for ffmpeg. It's the date of the latest major change. Maybe using the very latest one would be unstable. For x264, I'm using the latest daily snapshot: 20090108. Let me know if it would be better to use other snapshots as I don't follow the developement of this stuff.