It’s seems as if this site is a rather powerful wish list! It took exactly 11 days from my hope for other artists to follow in the footsteps of RADIOHEAD (suggesting to offer FLAC encoded files instead of MP3 encoded ones) until Saul Williams did just that. And now, less than a month after my request for multi-threaded H.264 decoding in ffmpeg, I finally have a build of MPlayer’s 1.0rc2 release running on my laptop that can playback the 1080p version of this BBC clip without dropping frames. Excellent!

Building it was a pain though. I started off using gutsy’s 1.0rc1 package, but I had to patch ‘rules‘ quite heavily until I had a package (that still runs scripts on installation that cause dpkg to fail). No wonder it won’t show up in gutsy any time soon. Once installed one has to run the new mplayer with -lavdopts fast:threads=2 in order to make the H.264 decoder use two threads instead of one. Even though it’s considered experimental it worked flawlessly for all the files I tried it on.

Now I’ll have to figure out, what to wish for next…