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mplayer on Intel Mac OS X

For all of us coming from the Linux world, there is no multimedia player that comes even close to mplayer. Well, there are binaries of this wonderful piece of software for those of you who are stuck with windoze ;-) Take my word and try it out. You will be amazed.

So, after I got my Mac book pro, I naturally decided to get mplayer working on it. After installing MacPorts, I got the initial system in place. I also managed to get the necessary dependencies compiled and ready.

Imagine to my surprise that mplayer will now crash on playing .wav files. Yes, on Intel Mac OS X, mplayer crashes while playing wav files.

Luckily, Dr.Google is always around to defuse these kind of situations. I found this and this. I followed what they had recommended, and now, I have my favorite multimedia player on OS X too !

I will repost what they have posted in case the links become obsolete or something. Basically, you need to open the file loader/Makefile and replace the line "CFLAGS= -Idshow -DMPLAYER -D__WINE__ -DNOAVIFILE_HEADERS" with this one "CFLAGS= -Idshow -DMPLAYER -D__WINE__ -DNOAVIFILE_HEADERS -mstackrealign -fno-unit-at-a-time". Please do remember that this is for the system that I use, which is MAC OS X 10.4.8/9 with gcc 4.0.1. I have not tested this on any other systems and hence, I cannot lay any other claims.

One of the reasons why I use mplayer is that the sound output is awesome. I think they use some kind of direct sound card write or something. Secondly, I can adjust the AV sync. That is very very important for me when I want to watch downloaded files. And finally, this was the only player which produced amazing output without framedrop on my previous HP Pavilion ZE 1250.

K.Shyam

Tags: MAC OS X, mplayer

Posted by Unknown at 8:41 PM