Re: [Freedos-user] MPlayer: Tips and Tricks

[Rugxulo <ru...@gm...>]

Hi,

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 8:04 AM, Butterfly Close
<clo...@gm...> wrote:
>
> Some hints, for FreeDOS lovers, or "HowTo Create a Nice Multimedia System
> from Old Hardware"
>
> MPlayer is two versions: official FreeDOS, with sources:
> http://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/user/mplayer/

IIRC, this is just an archival copy made by Jim Hall. It's not
official in any sense as there was (AFAIK) never a DOS/DJGPP
maintainer for this.

I never rebuilt it (probably a big pain) and have no interest in
multimedia (nor patents, ugh), so I never even tried running it. You'd
have more luck asking on BTTR's Forum. At least some of them have
rebuilt this (or similar, e.g. FFMpeg) in recent years, e.g. RayeR or
Khusraw.

> and old build from Michael Kostylev;
> http://www.ausreg.com/dos_ports/index.htm ; it seems that sources not exist
> in Web...

Mik was notoriously bad about publishing his efforts, and he basically
just disappeared. I'm not sure if he really ever meant to fully
propagate any of it. So most of it just wasn't properly vetted. He was
not really actively trying to volunteer for DOS communities. But that
didn't stop people from keeping what little bits of his that they
could find.

Anyways, I know GPL sounds nice here (which I assume is why you're
mentioning sources), but unless you're a glutton for punishment, you
will not enjoy trying to rebuild such things. DJGPP is just not
well-supported (upstream or downstream), so you're really swimming
against the tide. "Just use Linux" isn't advice, it's a requirement
since most *nix-y projects flat out refuse to even pretend to support
DJGPP.

> Forth tip. You can create file "mplayer.bat" with all options in it.
> here is my mplayer.bat: (mpoffi.exe is renamed "official" MPlayer)
>
> c:\mpoffi.exe -softvol -softvol-max 2000 -af resample 30000 > /dev/null %1
> %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

DJGPP supports response files, so "mpoffi.exe @blah.txt" should also
work (esp. if you're going beyond 128 chars).

> I hope it is interesting for somebody :) Thank you, FreeDOS MPlayer
> maintainer!
>
> P. S: here is link
> http://freedos.10956.n7.nabble.com/DJGPP-Mplayer-build-tp19621p19627.html
> (not tested yet); Thank you, Mr. Georg Potthast!

Again, it's probably not totally impossible to rebuild such things,
but most of it doesn't work "by default" with DJGPP, and AFAIK there
is no maintainer to any of this. Don't get your hopes up, what you see
is (maybe) all you get ... for now.