MPlayer distribution status

MPlayer distribution packages are often incomplete or crippled. Oftentimes they are not crippled, but people claim they are. This page tries to track the status of MPlayer in distributions to clear up this confusion and provide a quick overview of the situation.

Gentoo

Gentoo packages are supporting all the available options, including external encoders (like x264). Given the modular and adapting nature of Gentoo setups, the user defines which features are to be enabled.

Recent snapshots deemed stable are provide across almost every architecture supported.

It is also available a live ebuild in order to track the main branch development.

Check the Packages web interface for the up to date status.

Ubuntu

The mplayer package in Ubuntu supports various encoders including x264 and others.

Ubuntu 9.04 (karmic) and Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid) ship with MPlayer rc3.

Ubuntu 10.10 (maverick) ships with MPlayer rc4.

Daily snapshots built from SVN trunk are provided for Ubuntu lucid and up in this archive: https://launchpad.net/~motumedia/+archive/mplayer-daily/

Debian

Debian lenny ships with MPlayer rc2. It is not built against various external libraries like x264, mp3lame, etc. Also, mencoder was removed from the source tree.

Debian squeeze ships with MPlayer rc3. It is not built against various external libraries like x264, mp3lame, etc. Starting with this release, mencoder is included.