Bo Ørsted Andresen wrote:
And mplayer doesn't depend on ffmpeg at all...
It is true mplayer doesn't depend on you installing an ffmpeg package, but mplayer point releases have the ffmpeg libav dirs which are built into the mplayer binary. That makes mplayer a wrapper around the ffmpeg engine in my book though admittedly a fairly interesting and useful one. Mplayer's ffmpeg libs are usually a month or so behind current ffmpeg and the included hooks in Mplayer are there for the use of non free codecs. It's been experience that you tend to lean towards mplayer if you want to use non free code to increase the number of video formats you can decode/view.
In any case both recent versions of ffmpeg and mplayer in portage, 20061016 or better, have the newer ffmpeg real decoder. However I'm not sure it supports everything in real10 or whatever they're calling the Helix format. You can also skip installing win32/real codecs and download the codecs directly from mplayer in their essential codecs pack, but you might need to massage them into place on Gentoo. I'm not sure why the Gentoo ebuild requires the realplayer package to get the real codecs.
kashani, who knows far too much about running and building ffmpeg and mplayer straight out of cvs
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