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Joe Schmoe
Asked: 2021-10-18 16:29:33 +0800 CST

Does gmplayer work?

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I'm trying to get "gmplayer" to work. I did, eventually, get it to work, but it was a struggle, and I have a question (at the end of this post). Note: I first installed mplayer and it works just fine. That worked "out of the box". But when I installed mplayer-gui, then I had problems getting gmplayer working.

First, I was getting the error described at gmplayer can't run which boils down to doing (as root):

cd /usr/share/mplayer/skins/default
for FILE in *.png
do
    convert $FILE -define png:format=png24 $FILE
done

Note: convert is from ImageMagick.

But it still would not run. I get the following error message repeated infinitely until I CtrlC:

[vdpau] Error when calling vdp_device_create_x11: 1
Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device.
Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_i965.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I then consult the man page and work out that I need to specify the video driver using the -vo switch. When I add: -vo xv to the gmplayer command line, it works (still generates a bunch of warnings/errors on the terminal screen, but it does work) and I am able to watch the video and use the GUI interface to control mplayer. Yey!

But now I am wondering where the libvpau_i965 library comes from and if I can install it to make the error go away (i.e., so that it will work without -vo xv).

I do:

apt-file search libvpau_i965.so

and it doesn't find anything. So, that file doesn't seem to be in any of my sources for apt-getting. Any idea as to where to find it?

Edit to add:

I've also noticed that there is no command line or config file option to set the playback volume. gmplayer always defaults to (i.e., starts up as) zero volume, which is annoying. mplayer usually defaults to whatever the volume last was.

Anyway, here is a workaround script for gmplayer to set the volume up on startup:

#!/bin/bash
[ -r "$1" ] || exec echo "Not found: $1"
{ sleep 3;xdotool type '***********************************************'; } &
gmplayer "$1"
command-line

0 Answers