Re: Trying to play *.wmv files in Linux (Debian Sarge) using totem

[Amit Aronovitch]

Re: mplayer deb-package

I think I recall some ugly flamewars between mplayer upstream dev and debian maintainers (in debian mailing lists), so there might be some personal issues in this.
 I was not able to google them up, but I found this link http://people.debian.org/~mjr/legal/mplayer.html which seems to suggest that there were some legal issues, now resolved. I did not have time to read it fully.

 Anyways: two possible solutions

1) Christian Marillat's debian repository
deb http://cyberspace.ucla.edu/marillat/ unstable main
   I've been using it for some time, contained packaged mplayer plus dependencies plus other stuff - I believe it's still available and might contain recent versions.

2) The upstream mplayer source contains a debian/rules makefile which can be used to compile your own deb
make sure to fulfill the build-deps (I think there's some tool that does that automaticly, but the readme's provide some
extra tips, and it might be useful to follow manually).

Here's some notes I took last time I made my mplayer deb (seems to be from December, might be wrong/outdated, and I can't fully understand what they mean now - so no warranty etc.):

dependencies:
 libc6-dev
 x-window-system-dev (maybe just x-dev??)
 libpng-dev
 libgtk1.2-dev -> libgtk2.0-dev (seems like README is wrong)

 from ffmpeg:
   libavcodec-dev
   libavutil -- not in debian -- from ffmpeg?
   libavformat-dev (extra?)
  (I installed the deb packages (to be sure the deps are fulfilled), but copied the cvs resources   as the mplayer README suggests)

 more (for optional support, etc.):
  libfreetype6-dev
  libfribidi-dev
  libsdl1.2-dev