How can I build mplayer for the Pi?

Question

How can I build mplayer for my Pi 2 B running Jessie?

I've tried installing the mplayer package, but it installs mplayer2, which seems to have been abandoned for a few years. As I've been having many issues with mplayer2 (described below), I'd like to install a fairly new version of mplayer (also to take advantage of its new flags and such).

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My current issue with mplayer2 can be seen running these steps:

1. sudo apt-get update/sudo apt-get install mplayer
2. mplayer -idle -slave -ao null -vo x11 --display=:0
3. The above command should still be running. In the stdin, type loadfile /path/to/a/video.mp4
4. Wait for the video to finish playing.
5. Type loadfile /path/to/another/file.mp4.

I get a continuous list of X11 errors. mplayer2 closes the window after the first video is done playing, so when the second video is started, it gives me errors. I need to use mplayer in slave mode to add new videos, so I can't really work around it. (Even if I could work around it, mplayer2 still seems to randomly close the X11 window—presumably when the disk stalls/etc.—causing the same set of errors.) I feel like this is a bug that should be patched by now, so I really want to get an updated version of the software running. (This also isn't my first issue with mplayer2, so an upgrade may help with the issues I'm having.)

Answer 1

By downloading the souce snapshot from the website

Depending on when you download the snapshot, you'll need to change the extracted snapshot directory cd mplayer-export-xxxx-xx-xx/

wget http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/mplayer-export-snapshot.tar.bz2
tar xf mplayer-export-snapshot.tar.bz2
cd mplayer-export-2016-10-02/
./configure
make
sudo make install

The make will take a little while to complete, but should finish with out any errors.

This is tested on building and installing, but did not test your particular use cases.