KMPlayer Homepage - KMPlayer Installation Notes

KMPlayer Installation Notes

You need for KDE4

Untar the source package
```
  tar xfj kmplayer-<version>.tar.bz2
```
Create a build directory, eg /tmp/kmplayer-build and enter this directory

Set your environment for building KDE4 apps

  export QTDIR=path-to-qt4
  export KDEDIR=path-to-kde4
  export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIR
  export KDE_BUILD=$KDEDIR
  export DBUSDIR=$KDEDIR
  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$QTDIR/lib:$KDEDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
  export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$DBUSDIR/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig
  export PATH=$QTDIR/bin:$KDEDIR/bin:$PATH

Run cmake

  cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$KDEDIR -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release path-to-kmplayer-source

Run make
```
  make
```
Install as root
```
  make install
```

You need for KDE3

KDE-3.1 or higher, kdemultimedia is only needed for launching Arts Control.

XVideo

Not really needed actually, but without it video wont scale and the VDR viewer will not work. You can run xvinfo to see if the driver from your X supports this for your card. Otherwise you have to live with XShm.
Make sure to configure KMPlayer for XVideo or XShm in the configure dialog (General Options | Output)

Audio

Whatever output you want, make sure to configure KMPlayer that way in the configure dialog (General Options | Output). If you don't, backend players may just hang on accessing an audio device.

People with a full KDE install, will probably choose Analog Real-Time Synthesizer, which uses the artsd sound server.

Linux users can also choose for ALSA and disable any sound server. To enable multible audio sounds playing simultaneously, one can setup the 'dmix' plugin. Eg. if the following is in ~/.asoundrc (or /etc/asound.conf) with your sound card id instead of I440MX:

pcm.ossdmix {
       type dmix
       ipc_key 4339      # A unique number
       slave {
               pcm "hw:I440MX,0"
               period_time 0
               period_size 1024  # a power of 2 for OSS compatibility
               buffer_size 8192  # a power of 2 for OSS compatibility
       }
}
ctl.ossdmix {
       type hw
       card I440MX
}
# Make ALSA apps default to using it
pcm.!default {
       type plug
       slave.pcm "ossdmix"
}

# Make OSS apps default to using it
pcm.dsp0 {
       type plug
       slave.pcm "ossdmix"
}

The sound card id can you find with cat /proc/asound/cards, but IIRC a number will do too if you don't have plugable sound devices (like a webcam with microphone).

Player backends

Although not really needed, KMPlayer assumes you have a working mplayer somewhere in your PATH (comment out gui=yes in your mplayer config file, use gmplayer for MPlayer's own GUI instead)
Support for Xine, GStreamer and/or ffmpeg is optional, but the Xine backend is highly recommended esp. if you want to watch DVD. Of course, you need at least one of mplayer, xine or gstreamer to play anything at all. Install xine-lib and ffmpeg if you want it. You should install xine-lib before compiling kmplayer (and don't forget to run ldconfig if you compile/install xine-lib yourself). Same goes for GStreamer. MPlayer and ffmpeg can be installed afterwards.
MPlayer and Xine can use the binary only codecs. Basically, you should unpack these and copy the files to /usr/lib/win32
If you want to watch DVD's with the Xine or GStreamer backend player for more than a DVD that you get for free buying two packages of shampoo, make sure to install libdvdcss
If you want to use ffmpeg for a TV card, you need v4lctl from xawtv too.

Debian packages

I happen to have Debian installed and I very much prefer to install KMPlayer as a Debian package. KMPlayer comes with a way to create this package. Well four actually, so you can install just the plugin if you want.
To build the packages, just unpack the sources somewhere and run dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot in the kmplayer-version directory. Although the building ends with an error, the parent directory has four deb files that you can install with dpkg

If you want these packages to install/remove with apt-get, than you have to setup a local repository for it. For that, I've created a directory /usr/local/src/dpkg and in there I copy all kmplayer's deb files. After that, I run
dpkg-scanpackages /usr/local/src/dpkg /dev/null | gzip > /usr/local/src/dpkg/Packages.gz.
The file /etc/apt/sources.list should contain this repository, a line deb file:/usr/local/src dpkg/ does this for me (somehow it seems very picky on where the / are set). And finally apt-get update and apt-get install kmplayer (or apt-get install kmplayer-plugin for the plugin only, which will also install kmplayer-lib) will install it.

If you get a collision with another package (eg. kaffeine also installs x-mplayer2.desktop) then simply remove that one by editing debian/kmplayer-lib.install before building the package.