Avifile

Summary

Avifiles contains Aviplay, which is working great on gubbio. It's installed in /usr/local/bin and there's a symlink to a file called a, so that you can start it by typing

a <filename>

Playlist is still a problem -- there's an avi plugin for xmms that relies on avifiles, but avi-xmms-1.2.2
is not compatible with the most recent avifile releases.

Installation history

On 18 May I got avifile from the cvs -- see instructions at http://avifile.sourceforge.net/:

Recent development sources are available in anonymous CVS at sourceforge.net:

# cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.avifile.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/avifile co avifile

(see this page http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=11050 if you are first time user.)

Its CVSWeb interface address is: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/avifile/avifile-0.6/.

It's a good idea to use this ~/.cvsrc file with this content:

# lately it looks like sf.net has some problems with compressed access
# to CVS so if you are experiencing some hangs in cvs update remove '-z3'
cvs -z3 -q
diff -u -b -B
update -P -d
checkout -P

For updating you CVS use just cvs update -P -d

(Note: if you use .cvsrc with option above just type cvs update

Avifile didn't like automake 1.6, so I installed automake 1.5 -- when I followed the procedure for 1.6, the whole thing took a minute!

I then ran autogen.sh on avifile again, and it went fine. Then I ran ./configure, which also ran fine -- here is the summary:

Configuration for avifile CVS-020518-12:53-2.95.3
Compiler C: gcc -g -march=i686 -ffast-math -pipe
Compiler C++: g++ -g -march=i686 -ffast-math -pipe
Install path: /usr/local
Qt: yes
Sdl: yes
Xft: yes
Oss audio: yes
Sun audio: no
Mga_vid: no
Plugins:
ac3passthrough yes (with SBLive only)
divx4 no (DivX ;-), OpenDivX, DivX4)
xvid no (DivX4, XviD)
ffmpeg yes (DivX ;-), OpenDivX, MJPEG, AC3)
os motion jpeg yes (MJPEG)
win32 yes (DivX, WMF1/2, DV, MJPEG, Ati, Asus,...)
MAD yes (MPEG Layer I/II/III)
vorbis no
lame runtime no

You should install divx4, xvid, vorbis, and lame -- but this should be a fine start. The avifile make takes a while -- it's nice to see it's optimized for the 686 MMX architecture. I do a make install and it all works well -- and then I play and it works! It even accepts dvgrab's large index files, which Windows does not. And it lets you move forward fast, much better than mplayer. Finally, it lets you put an icon on the desktop and start it that way.

Note that you can also get a SuSE package for avifile -- pick it up at http://packman.links2linux.de/. For now, the compiled version is likely better, as it's optimized my machine and recognizes my codec libraries.

XVID

During the avifile compilation, I got a message suggesting I get xvid from http://www.xvid.org. I got the latest snapshot from the web site -- dated 2002-04-12 -- and then found instructions by chance in the discussion board to do this:

$ cd xvid_20020412/xvidcore/build/generic
$ make -f Makefile.linux

This started the compiling, but failed:

nasm -f elf ../../src/bitstream/x86_asm/cbp_mmx.asm -o ../../src/bitstream/x86_asm/cbp_mmx.o
make: nasm: Command not found
make: *** [../../src/bitstream/x86_asm/cbp_mmx.o] Error 127

When I had to register at the xvid site to ask a question on the board, I abandoned the attempt.

Script for playing avi files

On 23 May I downloaded the bash script afspil from http://klafbang.dk/programmer/afspil and edited the file with kwrite. I replace all instances of the word "afspil" with the word "play" and renamed the program play. I then placed it in /usr/local/bin and made it executable with chmod 755.

The program worked at once. To have it play all playable files in a subdirectory, type

play -R <dir name>

The only thing missing is that it won't maintain the screen configuration of the previous instance (each instance of aviplay is killed when the clip is done). In any case, here's your playlist. The program will also read a playlist if there is one. The program could of course be modified.