[MPlayer-cygwin] MinGW howto

[Diego Biurrun]

Hi!

I have reworked the Windows (formerly Cygwin) part of the ports section, 
here it is since some folks were interested in it.  Comments and 
additions welcome.

Diego


6.6 Windows

Yes, MPlayer runs on Windows under Cygwin and MinGW. It does not have a 
GUI yet, but the command line version is almost completely functional. 
Patches are always welcome. You should check out the mplayer-cygwin 
mailing list for help and latest information.

Best results are achieved with the native DirectX video output driver 
(-vo directx) and the native Windows waveout audio driver (-ao win32) as 
OpenGL does not work and SDL is known to distort sound and image or 
crash on some systems. You can make the movie window stay on top with 
-vo directx:ontop. If the image is distorted, try turning off hardware 
acceleration with -vo directx:noaccel. Download DirectX 7 header files 
to compile the DirectX video output driver.

QuickTime DLLs and Real Win32 codecs (not Real Linux codecs) also work. 
Compile with --enable-qtx and --enable-real and put the codecs into the 
default Windows DLL location, C:\WINNT\system32 or C:\Windows\system 
depending on your Windows version.

There are precompiled binary versions made by Sascha Sommer available 
for download from our homepage. Joey Parrish has been making unofficial 
Windows packages complete with installer.


6.6.1 Cygwin

Cygwin versions prior to 1.5.0 do not include inttypes.h. You will have 
to copy or symlink etc/cygwin_inttypes.h from the MPlayer source 
directory to /usr/include/inttypes.h in order to make MPlayer compile.

DirectX header files need to be extracted to /usr/include/ or 
/usr/local/include/.

Instructions and files for making SDL run under Cygwin can be found on 
the libsdl site.

You can play VCDs by playing the .DAT or .MPG files that Windows exposes 
on VCDs. It works like this (adjust for the drive letter of your CD-ROM):

mplayer d:/mpegav/avseq01.dat

mplayer /cygdrive/d/MPEG2/AVSEQ01.MPG

DVDs also work, just set the DVD device correctly to whatever your 
CD-ROM device is:

mplayer dvd://<title> -dvd-device '\\.\d:'

The Cygwin console is rather slow. Redirecting output or using the 
-quiet option has been reported to improve performance.


6.6.2 MinGW

Installing a version of MinGW that could compile MPlayer used to be 
quite tricky, but only consists of three simple steps now and should 
work out of the box soon.

    1. Install MinGW 3.0.0 or later.
    2. Install MSYS 1.0.9 or later and tell the MSYS postinstall that
       MinGW is installed.
    3. Replace /mingw/include/sys/types.h with this types.h.

Extract DirectX header files to /mingw/include/.

VCDs and DVDs work almost like Cygwin (adjust for the drive letter of 
your CD-ROM):

mplayer d:/mpegav/avseq01.dat

mplayer /d/MPEG2/AVSEQ01.MPG

mplayer dvd://<title> -dvd-device /d/