[MPlayer-users] best combination of mplayer,ffmpeg,x264

[Raimund Berger]

Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski <dominik at rangers.eu.org> writes:

> On Monday, 09 June 2008 at 11:11, Heinz Wiesinger wrote:
>> Hi!
>> 
>> I'm a contributor to SlackBuilds.org, which is a repository of build-scripts 
>> for making Slackware-packages.
>> We are currently discussing for the most appropriate moment to update ffmpeg 
>> and x264. We rely on the releases of mplayer and I think, there might be 
>> problems if we just update ffmpeg/x264 and leave mplayer behind. So I was 
>> thinking of updating ffmpeg and x264 everytime a new mplayer version gets 
>> released.
>> However, I'm not quite sure my assumption that there would be problems when 
>> using an older mplayer with recent x264/ffmpeg snapshots is correct. As you 
>> know probably more about such situations than me I thought of asking for your 
>> opinion on this.
>
> All three should usually be updated at the same time to snapshots from the
> same day. See the recent compilation problems due to FFmpeg requiring
> the current x264 snapshot for example.

Also note that mplayer has it's own, statically linked in copy of
ffmpeg in it's own source tree. So if you rely on mplayers ffmpeg
features (libavcodec etc), you need to update mplayer as well if you
want recently implemented ffmpeg stuff with mplayer.

Waiting for official releases makes little sense of course, as there
are none. Likely the safest way to go in that regard is use your
distribution packages, and then maybe upgrade to your distribution's
beta/testing version for recent stuff. This ensures the stuff at least
goes through some testing, including your distribution's user base.

If that's not enough, the given advice applies I'd say. Update all
three from svn/git simultaneously. But things could break at any time
in nonobvious ways, as patches apparently flow just in without further
testing. Quite natural for development trees, of course. So if you go
that way, be sure to test your versions for the stuff you want to do
before embarking on week long batch encodings just to find out
afterwards that things got messed up.