GTK MediaplayEr
foR LINux
Requirements
You don't have to worry about endless requirements lists containing 100s
of esotheric programs and libraries you need for running or even compiling
Gmerlin. Because of the powerful open source licenses, all non standard
3rd-party libraries are contained in the source tarball. Gmerlin doesn't
depened on a desktop like gnome or kde.
The only things you need are:
-
A fast PC. DVD or Divx playback (with PAL resolution) work on a 900 MHz
Athlon or less (Sorry, don't know the lower limit, maybe you can tell me).
We currently try to improve the performance on slower systems. Mp3 playback
has been seen on a P166 with about 20 % CPU load.
-
A recent linux installation with thread support (glibc >= 2.1 should be
ok)
-
A C++-compiler. Officially supported is gcc-3.0.1. If older gcc versions
work, you are lucky!.
-
A recent version of gtk. I use gtk-1.2.8 for developing Gmerlin, but older
1.2.x versions might work as well
-
You need XFree86 >= 4.0.1. If you want to use Xvideo (for hardware video
scaling), you need graphics card which supports Xvideo. Gmerlin is developed
on a machine with a Nvidia GeForce2 MX Card (using Nvidia's drivers). I'm
interested in reports on how Xvideo works with Matrox cards. If you don't
have Xvideo-Support, Gmerlin will automatically switch to XShm. Gmerlin
won't compile on Xfree86 3.X.X.
-
Linux Kernel >= 2.4.0 is needed for DVD-Support. Older versions may also
work, if you patch your kernel.
-
libjpeg, libpng and zlib (needed by libpng). These should be shipped with
every recent linux distribution
-
To watch AVI movies, which use Win32 codecs, get the latest binaries.zip
file from avifile.sourceforge.net
and install it into /usr/lib/win32. You might also want to download and
install the binary distribution of divx4linux from the avifile site before
compiling gmerlin.
-
Since Gmerlin is meant to be a Multimedia solution for the new Millenium,
there will be no backports for older kernel- or library versions.
Download
Click on the link below to download the latest tarball:
gmerlin-0.1.4.tar.gz
Build & Install
Fist of all, you should be aware, that gmerlin is a large and complicated
package, because it contains at least 11 (!) partly modified 3rd party
libraries. Many of them have their own configure scripts, so configuring
and compiling should work, but can take a while.
Gmerlin uses autoconf/automake/libtool, so there is nothing special
about the installation process. Just follow these steps (X.Y.Z is the version
number)
Unpack the package with:
tar -xvzf gmerlin-X.Y.Z.tar.gz
Or (if you don't have GNU tar)
zcat gmerlin-X.Y.Z.tar.gz | tar -xvf -
Change to the gmerlin source directory:
cd gmerlin-X.Y.Z
Configure the source tree:
./configure
By default, gmerlin will be installed in /usr/local. If you want to
change this, call
./configure --prefix=<prefix>
instead, where <prefix> is the desired destination (/usr or your
home directory or whatever).
Call
./configure --help
for more configuration options. The configure script shows many warning
messages. If you have all requirements shown above, all of them can be
ignored (No SDL or qt is needed).
Compile the stuff:
make
Compiler warnings can be ignored.
Install (as root):
make install
This will install the gmerlin executeable in <prefix>/bin, the plugins
and 3rd party libraries in <prefix>/lib/gmerlin, and some additional
data files in <prefix>/share/gmerlin. If you selected your home directory
as <prefix> you don't need to be root to install gmerlin. make install
is neccesary because gmerlin can't load plugins out of the sourcetree.
If you have an older gmerlin version installed on your system, it's
generally a good idea, to delete the whole <prefix>/lib/gmerlin directory
before installing the new version.
All directories are hardcoded inside the executeable, so moving the
plugins to a different location will prevent gmerlin from finding them.
Check it out, call:
gmerlin
and have fun :)