README

mplayer2 is a precursor to mpv (https://mpv.io/) that was developed mainly by
Uoti Urpala (uau). It used to have a website at http://mplayer2.org/, but all
official development has stopped and the website is now dead. A copy of the
website's source code is available at https://github.com/mplayer2/mplayer2.org.

mplayer2 is preserved here for posterity, as well as for use in setups that
mpv no longer supports. To this end, some additional patches that never
appeared in the official mplayer2 repository are included in branches other
than 'master', improving display quality, compatibility, fixing bugs and
adding small features. The default branch 'all' contains all useful and safe
patches. As time goes on and old systems become less and less relevant,
it is likely that fewer and fewer new patches will be added.


Compiling with full features requires development files for several
external libraries. Below is a list of some important requirements. For
more information see the output of './configure --help' for a list of options,
or look at the list of enabled and disabled features printed after running
'./configure'. If you think you have support for some feature installed
but configure fails to detect it, the file config.log may contain information
about the reasons for the failure.

Libraries specific to particular video output methods
(you'll want at least one of VDPAU, GL or Xv):
 - libvdpau (for VDPAU output, best choice for NVIDIA cards)
 - libGL (OpenGL output)
 - libXv (XVideo output)
general:
 - libasound   (ALSA audio output)
 - various general X development libraries
 - libass   (subtitle/OSD rendering)
 - Libav libraries (libavutil libavcodec libavformat libswscale)

Most of the above libraries are available in suitable versions on normal
Linux distributions. However FFmpeg is an exception (distro versions may be
too old to work at all or work well). For that reason you may want to use
the separately available build wrapper that first compiles FFmpeg libraries
and libass, and then compiles the player statically linked against those.