Multimedia

Configuring Software - smplayer and vlc

Personal computers are now the heart of the multimedia center in every household. It's crucial to have a modern, updated framework to play all of the latest and greatest multimedia formats with your Gentoo Linux system. Gone are the days of Windows Media Player prompting you to download a codec and repeatedly failing to do so. First, let's emerge the infrastructure. Before doing so, make sure you've set all of the appropriate multimedia USE flags in your /etc/make.conf.

$ sudo emerge -av a52dec faac faad2 flac lame libogg libmad libmatroska win32codecs libcddb libcdio libdvbpsi libdvdcss libdvdread libdvdnav libfame ffmpeg

You may already have a few of these packages as dependencies of other packages, so feel free to say no to the emerge and remove the packages you've already installed. Once the emerge has completed, let's emerge a few players. Smplayer is an excellent port of the open-source Linux media player, mplayer, in addition to the highly-compatible cross-platform media player, vlc. Before you emerge this package, make sure you have the qt4 USE flag set for the media-video/vlc package set in your /etc/portage/package.use as well as the global multimedia USE flags mentioned above.

$ sudo emerge -av smplayer vlc

Once emerged, you should have 2 excellent video players with a great deal of options and configurations you can utilize to maximize your Linux multimedia experience.