5. FAQ

These FAQ are a feeble beginning, and in no way complete. If you have any additions, questions not mentioned here (except for MPlayer compilation problems, we only want compilation solutions :-)), email them to me.

Q: Isn't this a lot of work, just to be able to watch XS4ALL DSL-TV?

No, because you can do much more with MPlayer. From the MPlayer documentation:

"It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, OGG/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, RealPlayer, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, RealMedia, and DivX movies too."

Besides, if MPlayer compiles in one go, the whole procedure shouldn't take more than 30 minutes (including reading this mini-HOWTO).
Furthermore, when you get this to work, you can watch any ASF/ASX stream on the internet.

Q: MPlayer won't compile!

Re-read the MPlayer documentation.
There is an extensive FAQ on MPlayer here.
If all else fails: browse the mplayer-users mailing list.
Did I mention to re-read the MPlayer documentation?
Did I mention not to ask me?

Q: Why can't I ask you?

I'm not an authoritative source on MPlayer (I just got it myself :-)), and wrote this mini-HOWTO in my own time, according to my own experiences. It works for me, and your mileage may vary.
You can hire me though ;-) I'm a trained and experienced all-round developer/consultant/system administrator.

Q: After closing MPlayer, something keeps eating my CPU cycles.

I had this on two occasions (both from Konqueror), on one occasion X was eating about 25%, on the other it was one of the kdeinits. First stopping MPlayer before closing it seems to help.

Q: After installing MPlayer, I installed lirc, but now MPlayer doesn't use it.

MPlayer configures itself for things it finds on your system at compile time. Since lirc wasn't there at the time, there's no lirc support compiled in. Re-./configure, re-make and re-make install MPlayer, and it will see lirc, and use it.

Q: I had a compilation problem, but I solved it.

Great! Let us know and I'll put it here in the FAQ, so others can benefit from it.