[arch-general] x264, mplayer, ffmpeg rebuild?

[Markus Heuser]

Hey guys,

Today i wanted to rip one of my dvds with h264enc from AUR [1]. I updated to 
the latest available version (8.6.6) but couldn't get it working together with 
the mencoder from the repos.

I'm not asking for support for an AUR package, but here is what I found out 
and I guess this could be important for other ripping/x264 encoding software 
as well:

The extra/x264 is severely outdated, in fact it lacks support for some
-x264encopts that can be used by mencoder and therefore breaks encoding. This 
seems not to be very common by now but sooner or later encoding tools will use 
these options and we should provide compatible packages :)

So, if one rebuilds x264 either with the $pkgver bumped to the latest 
available snapshot [2] or uses the AUR x264-git Package [3], MPlayer needs a 
rebuild too.

Using the official MPlayer PKGBUILD results in a build error with a possible 
solution posted on the forums [4]. I know that the OP is using an SVN version 
of mplayer but I couldn't get the new x264 working together with the mplayer 
PKGBUILD from the repos (another build error complaining about libavcodec), so 
upgrading to the latest & greatest (tm) version seems to be the next logical 
step to me.

I see that this "solution" involves using ffmpeg and mplayer svn versions which 
is obviously not suitable for the repos. But I'd be very thankful to see a 
rebuild of x264 and mplayer/ffmpeg as soon as the changes in ffmpeg and mplayer 
are in the stable branches and you guys can afford the time to do so :)

Greetings,
Markus

[1] http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=12121
[2] ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/videolan/x264/snapshots/x264-
snapshot-20081228-2245.tar.bz2
[3] http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=15774
[4] http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=61858