MPlayer And Mkv Linked Chapters VII

Mad Fish The One tried using this post to compile mplayer with Matroska linked chapter support and found that the compile failed. After some investigation I realized that I had already discovered that problem in July, which was also the last time I compiled mplayer. Unfortunately, I neglected to tell anyone else about it! Bad me! (-_-;

Development on the mplayer git repository has moved off the master branch, perhaps prompted by a bunch of yahoos suddenly taking an interest in the work... Anyway, the mplayer master branch hasn't changed at all since early July while the ffmpeg master branch is changing very rapidly, with result that mplayer no longer compiles against a recent ffmpeg checkout.

Mad Fish posted another solution here. The disadvantage of this one is that it depends on a third party patch, but it uses a newer ffmpeg which is a huge plus compared to what I did.

My solution back in July was to compile against a specific version (svn r19395) of ffmpeg. That version is now very old so it may be missing bugs fixes and other improvements. I've been using the same mplayer I compiled in July and I haven't noticed any problems. YMMV

git clone git://repo.or.cz/mplayer.git
cd mplayer.git
git clone git://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/
cd ffmpeg
git checkout 4477ec66b # git commit matching svn r19395
cd ..
./configure
make

I tried building the mplayer git development branch and I haven't gotten past the configure step yet. There have been many changes and it is not clear to me how it is detecting ffmpeg any more.

Finally, what is the official name of this Matroska feature anyway? I perused the Matroska site and it is not at all obvious what the spec calls it. I've been using "linked chapters", but others use "linked segments" and "order chapters." None of these strings appear anywhere in the spec.