[MPlayer-users] build mplayer for multiple distributions

[Giacomo Comes]

On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 04:58:38PM +0100, vongillus wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have about 150 Linux boxes with different distributions (RedHat 7.3  
> to 9, Suse 9.3 to 10.2), and I would like to build mplayer, mencoder  
> with GUI so that I can put it on a NFS server and everybody would be  
> able to use it.
> 
> So, I thought that the best solution would be to build as static  
> version of mplayer.
> 
> My question is : is it the best solution to build a static version of  
> Mplayer ? If not, is there another way ?
> 
> Thank you !

You will find that it's not easy to build a static version of mplayer.
1) mplayer needs many libraries and sometime your distribution provides some 
of them only as shared library causing failure.
2) it could be that some libraries can only be uses as shared (libdvdcss), so
failure again.

But if you disable some stuff may be you can have a static mplayer.

Another possible way to proceed is to compile mplayer for every distribution you 
have and make a script called 'mplayer' that check the ditribution of the machine
you are on and start the appropriate binary.
It is also possible that mplayer compiled on RedHat 7.3 will also run on newer
distribution of RedHat reducing the number of compilations.
But a recent mplayer compiled on a old system will not have some features because
on the old system it will not find recent libraries it requires.

And don't forget to use --enable-runtime-cpudetection

Ciao
Giacomo