How to update MPlayer & MEncoder in Ubuntu

The MPlayer version that is available through the official Ubuntu repositories is very old (1.0 RC2, released in April 2008). When you run a program like SMPlayer, it will complain that the MPlayer version is very old and some of the features won’t work properly.

To update MPlayer to the latest version, open a terminal window, copy-paste the following text and press Enter:

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/rvm/mplayer/ubuntu karmic main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 03E02400
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mplayer mencoder smplayer

Thats it! All the required packages will be downloaded and installed, and MPlayer will be updated to the latest version. To check the MPlayer version, open a command window and type mplayer.

Note:

The following repo is maintained by the SMPlayer developers and is regularly updated to include the latest MPlayer builds:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/rvm/mplayer/ubuntu karmic main

If you are using an older Ubuntu release then replace the word karmic with the corresponding nickname. For example, if you are using Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) then replace karmic with jaunty.

Posted on October 15, 2009, in Linux and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.

  1. i am trying to find a way to fix a bug.im using devede and when i try to do anything with it now all i get is’conversion failed it seems a bug of mencoder’ive uninstalled devede and just tried your update,but im still getting the bug message,any help?

  2. The proposed solution fails to work with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). [I did replace 'karmic' with 'jaunty'.]

    apt-get complains there are missing dependencies for mplayer, and that those dependencies cannot be installed.

    Missing dependencies it listed were:
    – libdirectfb-1.2

  1. Pingback: Open Warrior » mencoder webcam floating point exception solution

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