MPlayer crashes. Xine and Kaffeine OK

[willow7]

Hello, I just installed the Win32 codecs, and Xine and Kaffeine play wmv files without any problem. But MPlayer, which played only the audio portion of the wmv file before I added the codecs, now shuts down immediately. Does anyone know what the problem could be? I really don't have a clue about Linux, just a newbie with no computer background careening from one problem to the next (and enjoying it immensely). I may well not understand your answer, but I promise to try. I'm running FC4, upgraded from FC2.

Thanks,

[daneel971]

Try launching MPlayer from a console window; open a terminal and type:

mplayer /path/to/your/file.wmv

when/if it crashes you will see the error message: post here the message.
Also, what mplayer version do you use?
Just to confirm: does xine work with the same file?

[willow7]

Thanks, danee,

I'll have to check the path tonight when I'm home. Yes, both Xine and Kaffeine play the same file that crashes Mplayer.

I'm wondering myself about the MPlayer version. It's a leftover from FC2. Yumex doesn't list it as installed. I tried updating through yum and got a 'nothing to do' message. Synaptic (yes, I even tried Synaptic) says I have the latest MPlayer version installed, but when I typed MPlayer -v (which is the command for version, I hope) it gave me what seemed to be a very old version. 5.5.0.3 or something similar.

I'll get the correct answers to your questions tonight, and will post them.

MPlayer will play other files and cds, it's just Windows Media that crashes it.

Thanks again,

Leslie

[jhetrick62]

I believe that Stanton Finley has a great tutorial on installing Mplayer. Search the forum for one of his posts and click on his link.

Jeff

[nlkrio]

Originally Posted by jhetrick62

I believe that Stanton Finley has a great tutorial on installing Mplayer. Search the forum for one of his posts and click on his link.

Jeff

here is the link http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_cor...tes_nocss.html

[willow7]

Hi Jeff,

It is installed (even if Yumex can't see it) because it works beautifully for everything but Windows Media files. But I'll definitely check the link and see if I can find something.

Maybe I just need to remove it and then reinstall. (But first I'll answer your questions, danee.)

Thanks,

Leslie

[willow7]

It could be something to do with th gcc version in Core 4. I found this:

"16 June 2005

Some applications will NOT compile in GCC 4.0. You can install GCC 3.2
to allow compiling applications which do not yet support GCC 4.0. Make sure
to have the following RPM's installed. These are included with the CD's or
DVD or online. Running 'yum install' on these names will also work.

compat-gcc-32 (on CD-disk3)
compat-gcc-32-c++ (on CD-disk4)

To use either, run 'gcc32' or 'g++32'."

This info from http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mj...-fc4.html#gcc3.

I did see an error message flash by that mentioned an incompatible gcc version. (Sorry, should have remembered to mention that.)

Leslie

[willow7]

Very sorry, I had no time for Linux last night. I'll try to post the info tonight. I really do appreciate the help.

Leslie

[willow7]

Well, ...it’s much worse now. The original version I was running was mplayer 1.0pre5-3.3.3. It was from freshrpms and it was a left-over from FC2. When I saw how old it was, I removed it with yum and downloaded the latest livna version. Also tried the Mplayer.hu download. Now I’ve got the freshrpm download of MPlayer 1.0pre7-4.0.2’. I’ve had endless error messages since. Avisynth missing (I added it in), and now ‘AVIFIL32.dll failed to load’. I found AVIFIL32.dll.so in my Wine folder and copied it to the /usr/lib/win32 folder. But that didn’t help. The weird thing is that I can now play Windows Media Files (which were the only files that wouldn’t play before) with Mplayer. Xine will too. Xine will play DVDs, but Mplayer won’t. (And Kaffeine won’t play anything at all though it used used to work perfectly with all files.) I’m so confused.

Another weird thing... After downloading the Mplayer rpm from Mplayer.hu, I found a codecs.conf file in /etc/mplayer. When I removed it I could play Windows Media files, when I put it back, I couldn’t. It didn’t seem to affect DVD play.

I also made a symbolic link between /usr/lib/win32 and /user/local/lib/codecs. (Because I read that somewhere.) I’m not sure that was a great idea in this case. Can someone tell me the command to remove symbolic links?

Here’s the output from the mplayer command:
[me@localhost ~]$ mplayer /media/cdrom
MPlayer 1.0pre7try2-4.0.2 (C) 2000-2005 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel Pentium 4/Xeon/Celeron Foster (Family: 8, Stepping: 4)
Detected cache-line size is 64 bytes
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1

Failed to open /dev/rtc: Device or resource busy (it should be readable by the user.)
Opening joystick device /dev/input/js0
Can't open joystick device /dev/input/js0 : No such file or directory
Can't init input joystick
Setting up LIRC support...
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support.
You will not be able to use your remote control.
Playing /media/cdrom.
Cache fill: 0.00% (0 bytes) Win32 LoadLibrary failed to load: AVIFIL32.dll, /usr/lib/win32/AVIFIL32.dll, /usr/local/lib/win32/AVIFIL32.dll


MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: demux_open
- MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and
disassembly. Details in DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports_what.html#bugreports_crash.
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your
gcc version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read
DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html and follow the instructions there. We can't and
won't help unless you provide this information when reporting a possible bug.

(I hope that that's the correct terminal command to play a DVD.)

To me, it seems that all the codecs are there, but Mplayer can’t find (some of) them. (But what do I know?) I don’t really expect anyone to solve this because of all I’ve done. Just thought I’d share the misery. Any suggestions are welcome (but please don’t tell me to download the win32 codecs. --I’ve got ‘em).

On the bright side, I’m getting to know my way around the filesystem better.

[buddha]

After re-reading your last post several times, it seems that you wanted mplayer to play a DVD, is that correct?

Well, two issues with that. For one, as great as mplayer is, it lacks support for DVD menus. Xine has full support for DVD menus. This does not mean that mplayer has no DVD playback support. You just have to explicitly tell mplayer what title and optionally, what chapter, you want to play back.

To play back Title 1 of a DVD, you would use

mplayer dvd://1

More info here from the mplayer documentation:
4.2. DVD playback
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/dvd.html

You got that avisynth error because of your incorrect command, "mplayer /media/cdrom"

avisynth.dll is not needed by mplayer (or xine) at all.

Remove symbolic links with the "rm" command.

[willow7]

Hi Buddha,

I just updated a few libdvd-ish files and Kaffeine is working perfectly again. Don't know why, --but I seldom do. I'm just happy it's back.

The problem with MPlayer seems to be that I can either play video files (Windows Media or Quicktime, or Video-TS...) or I can play DVDs. But never both. Xine, and now Kaffeine again, play everything perfectly. I was just curious why Mplayer first wouldn't play Windows Media files, even though I had the codecs. And now will play Windows Media but the price is that it suddenly won't play DVDs. It's as though MPlayer can now only find the codecs for one ot the other. Maybe it has to do with that symbolic link.

So the command is "rm ln <file> <file>"? I know 'rm', but it's the rest of the command I'm not sure of. --I don't want to do anything (else) dastardly to files I need.

Thanks for giving me the correct terminal command for playing a DVD with MPlayer. I'll try that. But, I usually use the GUI (can you tell?) and trying to play a DVD that way still fails. I assume that clicking play DVD will send the correct command to MPlayer, but it still crashes. So isn't there more of a problem than my incorrect terminal command? Does MPlayer ever need AVIFIL32.dll?

I tried mplayer dvd://1, and here are the results:

[me@localhost ~]$ mplayer dvd://1
Using GNU internationalization
Original domain: messages
Original dirname: /usr/share/locale
Current domain: mplayer
Current dirname: /usr/share/locale

MPlayer 1.0pre7-4.0.2 (C) 2000-2005 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel Pentium 4/Xeon/Celeron Foster (Family: 8, Stepping: 4)
Detected cache-line size is 64 bytes
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1

Linux RTC init error...
You will not be able to use your remote control.
Playing dvd://1.
Reading disc structure, please wait...
There are 9 titles on this DVD.
There are 24 chapters in this DVD title.
There are 1 angles in this DVD title.
DVD successfully opened.

That sounds good --but nothing happened after that. MPlayer didn't open.

The problem isn't really important. I have other players that I can use. But it just fascinated me that moving a file can have such far-reaching results. Why do the other players find what they need but MPlayer can't? I notice MPlayer is listed in usr/share/local. Maybe it's looking for codecs there, and not in usr/local/lib? (--or something...)

Thanks very much, Buddha.

[buddha]

Hi willow7,

Glad you got xine and kaffeine working again. kaffeine is a front-end to xine, so that makes sense. I tried kaffeine after reading your earlier message and it seems like a pretty nice GUI. I read through the kaffeine documentation to find out how to re-run the kaffeine first-time configuration wizard. From the command line,

kaffeine --wizard

is a way to double-check that kaffeine finds everything. Especially a good idea if you've been installing/uninstalling related stuff. Also, you might run "xine-check" to check that your xine install is good. I don't know if xine-check comes with xine rpms since I always compile xine and mplayer from source code. I'm really a command-line kind of person, can't you tell? But GUIs are nice and I use Gnome as my desktop.

So many questions and so many answers! Linux video is my "sub-hobby" of linux so I've learned much over the last few years.

To remove a symbolic link, you can use unlink or rm. You are good to be very careful with this. Example:

rm -i <symbolic_link_name>

should ask you if you really want to remove the link, say 'y' to accept. Be careful not to have a trailing slash after the link name.

AVIFIL32.dll does not exist anywhere on my FC4 system and I can play everything just fine. It's weird how mplayer spits out an error like that when you give it a wrong thing to play,

On my system I tried what you did, so you can see:
------------------------
$ mplayer /media/cdrecorder
MPlayer 1.0pre7try2-3.2.3 (C) 2000-2005 MPlayer Team
CPU: Advanced Micro Devices Athlon MP/XP/XP-M Barton (Family: 6, Stepping: 0)
Detected cache-line size is 64 bytes
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 0
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 3DNow 3DNowEx SSE

Playing /media/cdrecorder.
Cache fill: 0.00% (0 bytes) Win32 LoadLibrary failed to load: avisynth.dll, /usr/local/lib/codecs/avisynth.dll, /usr/lib/win32/avisynth.dll, /usr/local/lib/win32/avisynth.dll

Exiting... (End of file)
------------------------
None of the AVIFIL32 or avisynth stuff is needed whatsoever for xine or mplayer. No files with those names exist on my FC4 system and I have no problems.

If you post what symbolic links you have created (probably to codec directories), I can probably help sort those out too.

I'm gonna look into your other questions about mplayer GUI DVD playback in a little while.

[buddha]

I've gone back and tried a commercial movie DVD with mplayer...and right off the bat it wouldn't play! But this was easy to resolve. Sometimes, for reasons still unclear to me, the DVD cannot be read by xine or mplayer.

I remembered the old "trick" to get things working again. Eject the DVD and reload. And make sure the DVD is not mounted.

Then I could play the DVD from Xine or mplayer (command line) or gmplayer (GUI).

I don't know what's going on with your mplayer DVD troubles, but as long as you have all the libdvd* packages

$ rpm -qa | grep libdvd
libdvdnav-0.1.10-0.lvn.1.4
libdvdcss-1.2.9-0.lvn.1.4
libdvdplay-1.0.1-0.lvn.3.4
libdvdread-0.9.4-0.lvn.1.4

I would think you should be able to play DVDs successfully. Or maybe something got knocked out of whack when you were trying different packages.

[willow7]

Hi Buddha,

I'm at work now, but will check my libdvd files when I get home. Will also try ejecting the DVD and reloading. (On FC2 I used to have to open Xine twice to get it to work. The first would give me a 'no MRL' error. I'd leave that one open, and would open a second that would play the DVD without complaint. Very quirky!) Will also try xine-check and kaffeine --wizard. Thanks for those commands. I may just learn something from the output.

The symbolic link I used is: # ln -s /usr/lib/win32 /usr/local/lib/codecs. I did this because of a How-To I found here: http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mp...ora.html#files. But MPlayer didn't really seem to put any files in /usr/local/lib. They seem to be in /usr/share/local. MPlayer played DVDs without any errors just a couple of days ago, so it must be something I did. This symbolic link may be the culprit.

Very happy to hear that Linux video is your 'sub-hobby'! Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

[buddha]

Originally Posted by willow7

The symbolic link I used is: # ln -s /usr/lib/win32 /usr/local/lib/codecs. I did this because of a How-To I found here: http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mp...ora.html#files. But MPlayer didn't really seem to put any files in /usr/local/lib. They seem to be in /usr/share/local. MPlayer played DVDs without any errors just a couple of days ago, so it must be something I did. This symbolic link may be the culprit.

I think you are correct about the symbolic link being the most likely cause. It can be quite confusing to figure out where to put all the codecs so that both xine and mplayer can find what they need.

First, remove the symbolic link you created earlier. Then, put all win32 codecs in "/usr/lib/win32" and put all mplayer codecs in "/usr/local/lib/codecs". Both Xine and Mplayer should then be able to find all codecs.

The symbolic link you created may have hidden the mplayer codecs in /usr/local/lib/codecs, or the mplayer codecs may just be missing.

You might want to reinstall the mplayer codecs. Two ways to do this: 1) from the mplayer codecs page, download the all-20050412.tar.bz2 file and untar everything to /usr/local/lib/codecs, or 2) download from http://rpm.greysector.net/mplayer/do...-optional.html, the mplayer-codecs and mplayer-codecs-extra RPMs and install the rpms which will put the codecs in /usr/lib/codecs, which also works for mplayer.