[MPlayer-users] Playing DASH streams / .mpd files

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 17 March 2021 09:53:22 CET, Dave Woodfall <dave at tty1.uk> wrote:
>On 16/03/21 22:01,
>Reimar Döffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de> put forth the proposition:
>> Hi!
>> On Sat, Mar 13, 2021 at 06:23:21AM +0000, Dave Woodfall wrote:
>> > How does one play a DASH stream in mplayer?
>> >
>> >
>https://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/dash/nonuk/dash_low/aks/bbc_radio_four_extra.mpd
>> I've not had time to actually test, but I think it should just work
>> if you link against a separately built FFmpeg instead of MPlayer's
>> own copy.
>> The problem is that with the built-in FFmpeg copy we disable the DASH
>> demuxer because it would create a dependency on libxml2.
>
>Thanks for the reply.
>
>That would explain why ffplay works then, and why I couldn't get any
> -lavfdopts or other flags to make mplayer play any streams, although
>I have very limited knowledge of ffmpeg flags and what they all do.
>
>Is there a problem with linking to libxml2?  My copy of (a recent svn
> + ffmpeg from git) mplayer seems to link to it:
>
>ldd =mplayer | grep xml
>libxml2.so.2 => /usr/lib64/libxml2.so.2 (0x00007f3f32630000)

Huh, that seems strange.
It's not a very nice dependency and DASH is fairly rare, so I probably would have rather avoided it, though mostly I thought we did not have a configure check for libxml2, adding those is always a pain.
It's possible to remove the one mention of DASH from configure to enable the support and see what happens...