[MPlayer-users] gentoo: mplayer plays audio files but DVDs play silent

[RC]

On Sun, 19 Aug 2007 15:55:18 -0400
"Whilom Chime" <whilom_chime at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I > tried to play a  DVD, and mplayer complained of unavailable codecs
> (details below) so I  emerged several codec packages and re-emerged
> mplayer.  Still no joy.

ac3 support is staticly compiled in, installing codecs will have no
effect.

> "mplayer -ac help" clearly lists the codecs mplayer is looking for

Yes, it lists them all, whether you have them or not.

> MPlayer dev-SVN-rUNKNOWN-3.4.6 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team
> CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.40GHz (Family: 15, Model: 2, Stepping:
> 9) MMX supported but disabled
> MMX2 supported but disabled
> SSE supported but disabled
> SSE2 supported but disabled

This is all troubling information, suggesting a terribly improperly
configured version of MPlayer

> ===== Requested audio codec family [a52] (afm=liba52) not available.
> Enable it at compilation.

That is indeed your problem.

Checkout a snapshot of MPlayer from SVN, compile with simple defaults,
and everything should work.  If it doesn't, then you should report the
problem.  3rd party packages (including Gentoo's source-based ebuilds)
are really not supported, and often horribly broken.