If I have a “claim to fame” at all in the linux world it’s for my Debian Mplayer How-To.
It all started when I was running Debian Woody in early 2003. I spent an entire morning pulling my hair out trying to get mplayer compiled from scratch with the newly released quicktime codecs. There were no good how-tos. Finally I asked for help from some people I knew in a channel on freenode. A friend there walked me through the steps of where to put the codecs, and even how to make it into a .deb so installing and uninstalling it would be a breeze.
I then thought about how helpful the whole IRC log would be to people in my similar situation. I saved the log of his teaching, rewrote the entire thing, cleaned it up, made things clear, and voila! The first Debian Mplayer How-To was born.
After a few months it started picking up traffic. I did an update in March of 2003. It got more traffic. I updated in September of 2003, and that’s when a friend pointed out that it was the first hit on google for “debian mplayer”
Cool.
Then I switched to Gentoo for my primary workstation and let the How-To collect dust for all of 2004, and most of this year. With the exception of the live.com codecs I had up there (conflicted with newer g++ versions), it all worked fine. I have still been getting at least one email a month about it, and it’s not uncommon for new people I meet on IRC to ask me if I am “the one who wrote that debian mplayer how-to”
I felt bad about letting it collect dust, but I didn’t have a decent debian box or a whole lot of time for testing of the rewrite.
So last weekend I dropped Gentoo. Etch is now on my computer, and Thursday I opened up my How-To and installed Debian. But I grabbed the newest stable source for Mplayer (v1.0pre7) and newer live.com codecs. I ran into some trouble, which I eventually pinned down to not having vorbis-tools in the “apt-get install” line, oops. But other than that, it works.
Today I updated the site to reflect the changes I made in my own installed. I’m still using the older divx, realplayer, win32 and quicktime codecs, but I haven’t had any problems with these.
Yay! Finally updated!