More DivX Goodness!

[Siskmarek]

This little tute may seem blatantly obvious, but for those of us who weren't blessed with lightning-quick intuition and are new to the world of snuggly penguins, I so humbly offer up this little tip on getting excellent DivX playback under Linux.

I run Mandy 8.1 happily on my machine, but one thing made me sad. While DivX movies encoded a while back (probably with version 3) play just fine, more recently encoded movies (like the Warcraft 3 Trailer, etc) do not play with the standard installation of the win32 codecs, avifile and such.

Solution? Why not use the latest offering from DivX.com to fix things up? At the time of this writing it is up to v4.12.

"Ah," but you say, "That version is just for Windows!" Right you are! But we can use that to our advantage.

I'll assume some things before we get dug into it: You have a working installation of WINE (optional), or a working installation of Windows9x/ME/2000/XP (working! hahahahaha.. *sniff* gawd, I kill myself), the win32 codecs are installed (/usr/lib/win32) properly, and you have an AVI player that makes use of the codecs under /usr/lib/win32. If you need any help with these prerequisites then go ahead and look it up elsewhere because it is out of the scope of this little help thingie. Also, I'm too lazy to write it. ='D

For those of you that have the Windows partition available to Linux:

You can go under Windows, install the latest divx bundle, and then copy the codecs divx.dll and divxdec.ax from windir/system/ to your /usr/lib/win32 dir (this will overwrite the previous codecs. If this prospect scares you, rename the old codecs to something else, like divx.dll.old).

If you are fortunate enough to lack Windows then you can use WINE to "install" the latest codec under your fake windows directory. Then it is merely a matter of doing the same as above and presto! Instead of the 4.02 codec they have Linux users stuck with, you are running slick and fast with 4.12. No more bothering with trying to get The Playa working under WINE and such (which I tried... DivX playback was dismal, but when I run it "natively" so to speak through avifile, then it runs even better than if I were under Windows and watching the same thing).

While I do not cover the other installations necessary to even get to this step, I have to say that, now that I look back at it, getting top-notch DivX playback under Linux working was damn easy. RPM packages for avifile and other necessary items were readily available and they installed without a hitch, and now with this little trick I couldn't hope for anything better for watching my DivX movies... yes, even Windows can't hold a candle to it!

Thanks for your time. Good luck with everything!

~ Siskie

[ansivirus]

or you can use mplayer and divx4linux v.4.11 or whatever it is right now

:)

-ansiVirus

[ 06 January 2002: Message edited by: ansivirus ]

[Siskmarek]

In my experience Mplayer is nearly impossible to install, and documentation for it is horrid. I much prefer to just download some rpms for avifile and the win32 codecs, do an rpm -ivh *.rpm in that directory, then copy over whatever the latest codec is from divx.com. No hassles with compilation screw-ups or anything. ^_^

~ Siskie

[Icarus]

Originally posted by Siskmarek:
<STRONG>In my experience Mplayer is nearly impossible to install, and documentation for it is horrid. I much prefer to just download some rpms for avifile and the win32 codecs, do an rpm -ivh *.rpm in that directory, then copy over whatever the latest codec is from divx.com. No hassles with compilation screw-ups or anything. ^_^

~ Siskie</STRONG>

You found the MPlayer documentation!? :p
j/k it is a pain to install but once you figure it out, it's almost as simple as ./configure --disable-gcc-checking --enable-gui
make
make install
Using Red Hat 7.2 with the 2.96 gcc compiler that first line is a must, and for the gui that is nice to have. Then get the fonts and skins for the gui, put them in the shared directory (I put them under the user's also) and edit the config file...BAM! all done! Simple, eh? :D

[ansivirus]

try downgrading your compiler to 2.95-3 and you won't see any probs... it will just be

./configure (with --enable-gui if you want gui)

make

make install

-ansiVirus

[Siskmarek]

Nah. I'll stick with avifile for now. Why fix something when it isn't broken? =')

~ Siskie

[Icarus]

Originally posted by Siskmarek:
<STRONG>Nah. I'll stick with avifile for now. Why fix something when it isn't broken? =')

~ Siskie</STRONG>

MPlayer is not broken, it even has an avifile skin :D
Grab your secret decorder ring and head to the documentation if you do have problems or want something 'special' supported...like DVD playback

[Siskmarek]

When I want DVD playback, I'll use Ogle... another incredibly easy to install program. Same deal, just toss all ogle-related rpms into a dir, rpm -ivh *.rpm, and now I can watch "Shrek" and use DVD menus and the whole nine yards. ^_^

~ Siskie

[Speedy]

The reason that I use the native linux divx codecs is that it cuts processor usage from ~20% to about ~5% on playback and it makes encoding in divx4 efficient enough that I can capture and encode 320x240 video from my tv card in realtime. But, whatever works.

-Speedy

[Siskmarek]

:eek: 20%?? What kind of a computer are you using?

Playing a DivX movie on my machine hardly makes a dent on my little CPU meter thingie... ='P

~ Siskie

[hetman]

mplayer rules!