Problems building mplayer [WAS: Greetings Mplayer Maintainers!]

[Joseph D. Wagner]

On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 09:04:14 -0600, Richard Shaw wrote:

> Ok, ran into my first problem:
> cfg-common.h:530:5: error: initializer element is not constant
> cfg-common.h:530:5: error: (near initialization for 
> 'common_opts[114].p')
>
> The line in cfg-common.h is using pp_help which is provided by the
> ffmpeg header:
> /usr/include/ffmpeg/libpostproc/postprocess.h
>
> Which contains:
> #if LIBPOSTPROC_VERSION_INT < (52<<16)
> typedef pp_context pp_context_t;
> typedef pp_mode pp_mode_t;
> extern const char *const pp_help; ///< a simple help text
> #else
> extern const char pp_help[]; ///< a simple help text
> #endif
>
> I'm not sure how (52<<16) is evaluated but the version major is
> defined as 51 so I'm assuming the first part of the if clause is used
> instead of the else portion.
>
> /usr/include/ffmpeg is in the header search path so I don't think 
> it's
> a problem of not finding it.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> Richard

 From my dissection of mplayer's build process, it appears to be so 
tightly
integrated with ffmpeg that it depends upon internals which are not 
part of
the exposed API.  One has to download the ffmpeg trunk into a 
subdirectly
within the mplayer build directory.  This download must be the latest,
bleeding edge version straight from git, unless you're willing to try 
to
synchronize a previous ffmpeg git with previous mplayer svn.

Additionally, the default build uses static libraries, and using shared
libraries appears broken (at least when I tried it).  I asked the 
mplayer
mailing list for help.  I was told flat out that using shared libraries
wasn't supported "here" (the mailing list).  I was able to get it to 
build
using static libraries, but not in a manner that would pass the sort of
quality control you would want in a RPM package; even if I did, it 
would
still be using static libraries.

This is why I was hoping to leverage the experience of the previous 
package
maintainer.

The only options I see are to 1) continue my painful dissection 
efforts, or
2) switch to something else and abandon mplayer.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks for your time and help.

Joseph D. Wagner