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 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.

Smplayer has some idiosyncracies that sadly haven't quite been taken into consideration by the Gentoo devs. This may be because I haven't filed bug reports on these issues yet.

If you find that your screensaver is kicking in while you are watching a movie in smplayer, it is because the default heartbeat for mplayer doesn't work proplerly with xscreensaver. The fix is as follows.

$ cd
$ nano -w .mplayer/config

Make sure the file contains the following directive:

heartbeat-cmd="/usr/bin/xscreensaver-command -deactivate > /dev/null &" 

Your screensaver should no longer come on while watching movies using smplayer without incurring any lag or other ill effects.

Sometimes when clicking on files using your favorite file manager, smplayer will open, but your file won't start playing. You can drag and drop your file into smplayer and it will start playing, or you can use the File menu to open it, but the following fix should solve the problem permanently.

$ sudo nano -w /usr/share/applications/smplayer.desktop

Find the line in the file

Exec=smplayer %U

And change it to

Exec=smplayer %F

Save the file and you should have no more problems opening files in smplayer from your file manager.