Notices

A new build mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.13.800 was just released:
* Some workaround for N800 that should reduce or eliminate hangs when seeking
* Bugfix for alignment problem in ASF files

Thanks for the file, checked it. It contains AAC audio track. Currently MPlayer does not use DSP codec for AAC and uses its own code for it. The AAC decoder from MPlayer is not optimized for ARM currently, moreover it uses floating point math in default configuration. It is possible to configure it to use fixed point math, but fixed point decoder is much less stable and it even does not support one of the AAC variants. As N800 has vfp, I configured AAC decoder to use floating point math, but it is still too slow to play this file.

It is all about priorities. Surely, AAC playback can be improved (maybe using DSP decoder), but it requires quite a lot of work. In the mean time fixing or improving something else might be better. Right now MPlayer is optimized for mpeg4 video (and variants such as divx,xvid,flv,etc.) and mp3 audio on Internet Tablets. Also there will be always media formats (mostly proprietary and closed source) which are supported by built-in player, but very poorly supported or not supported at all in mplayer, real media files for example. It is generally better to avoid such media files if possible, as they are an evil thing and may bite you in the future (think about the possibility of the company behind this format getting out of business and upgrade to some new hardware/os with no codecs to support this format any longer).

As for the bugs, their fixes and stabilization of MPlayer on N800. We need to decide what is important for us, what needs to be fixed ASAP, and what can wait a bit longer. Hint: bugtracker at MPlayer garage project page works and the bugs which are reported there actually get fixed

can someone help me how to set mplayer to display subtitles in cyrillic?

You need to add a line 'subcp=cp1251' (without quotes) to /home/user/.mplayer/config file on your device

The information that was supposed to be enough for changing subtitles charset is available at the bottom of maemo mplayer home page. If you had some troubles understanding it, please explain what exactly was hard for you, we may try to improve that part on the website.

Surely, it would be better to have subtitles charset (and other options) configurable from GUI, but we still did not find a volunteer who would like to do that.

thanks for the tip, works great! i'm new to linux so it was a little hard for me to set up the whole thing alone. now thanks to a friend of mine everything is allright.

Serge - no worries about the mp4 file, it was just one of those files I had lying around and it formed part of my "test suite" but isn't something I need to watch or a format I would encode to in future (it's a file I grabbed it off my phone).

The new release of MPlyaer is great!
Just wondering how to make RTSP streaming work with MPlayer ? Is the Live555 module easy to be compiled with MPlayer ? Any hints where to start to port the Live555 to N800 for Mplayer ?

Thanks!
Kc

Can those who had problems with audio/video synchronization on some files test these files with the latest version mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.14.800 again and report results? I have rewritten mp3 audio passthrough fake decoder to make audio/video work better with variable bitrate audio. On the other hand, that's relatively a lot of changes, so testing is required to ensure that nothing else got broken. Please don't hesitate and report any problems.

PS. As soon as N800 package gets into a good shape and we ensure that it has no (major) problems remaining, I'm going to release an updated Nokia 770 package as well.

Seems to be an improvement Serge - thanks! It's definately better with videos that had audio sampled at 44.1khz, these would always go out of synch with mplayer and - after testing for only a few minutes - they now seem to stay in synch.

It will probably work fine if compiled in. Looks like MPlayer requires installing external dependency for Live555 support. I have no experience with RTSP streaming, so I don't know how it should work and how to test it though.
If you want to try compiling your own build of MPlayer for maemo, you can checkout sources from garage mplayer SVN and run either 'make deb-n800' or 'make deb-n770' in scratchbox. All the configuration options can be found in 'debian/rules' file.