[CentOS] Can't play DVD movies on CentOS 5.3 after following guidance on the wiki

Wed Jun 3 22:45:46 UTC 2009
Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 at duke.edu>

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009 at 1:06pm, MHR wrote

> On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 12:53 PM, Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 at duke.edu> wrote:
>>
>> What version of mplayer are you using (and from what repo)?  The CentOS
>> version doesn't help too much, as mplayer isn't included in any of the
>> default repos.  And this doesn't appear to be a very recent feature
>> (googling reveals references to it that are over a year old).
>>
>
> You made me look, and I found that I was missing a couple of packages.
> I now have:
>
> mplayer-fonts-1.1-3.0.rf.noarch
> mplayerplug-in-3.55-1.el5.rf.x86_64
> mplayer-skins-1.8-1.nodist.rf.noarch
> mplayer-1.0-0.40.rc1try2.el5.rf.x86_64
> mplayerplug-in-3.55-1.el5.rf.i386
> mplayer-docs-1.0-0.40.rc1try2.el5.rf.x86_64
> 
> These are the most recent imports from rpmforge.

That may be, but that's actually a *very* old version of mplayer.  The 
most recent "release" of mplayer is 1.0rc2, and *that's* dated 10/7/07 
(see <http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/ChangeLog>).  Most folks 
run SVN snapshots of mplayer -- rpmfusion's package for Fedora, e.g., is a 
SVN snapshot from 9/3/08.  And even that is too old for a lot of things. 
For my HTPC, e.g., I compiled mplayer from my own SVN checkout so I could 
use VDPAU, which only got added within the last few months.

> BUT:  I looked again, and the man page remains the same....  I even
> checked the mplayer home site, and neither option is mentioned in
> their documentation.

I see -heartbeat-cmd on 
<http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1.html>.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin
UCSF