Wastage

I stumbled across this amusing video of a cat drinking by dunking its head under a flowing tap. Even this light-hearted fun had some people in the comments bemoaning the wasted water of a tap being on for a few minutes of recorded video.

Then, with the subject of wasted water fresh in my mind, I switched tabs to this story (also from Reddit), and almost snorted my tea.

It was funny at the time.

Building MPlayer from SVN on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

I use the command line mplayer on Mac OS. The only competition for this superb video player is VLC, but sometimes I like to just quickly launch something without a bulky UI getting in the way.

But today I upgraded to Snow Leopard, distinctive from it's predecessor in being a truly native 64-bit operating system. And my SVN checkout of MPlayer stopped working, giving me a green video window and needing some effort to kill. So, to get MPlayer working, you're going to need the following:

• Apple Developer Tools


• libpng


• libjpeg


• freetype

...and, of course, your MPlayer sources. If you want FAAC support, get libfaac and build/install it using the same procedure as for freetype below.

Install the Apple Developer Tools using the graphical installer.

Build libpng and libjpeg:

./configure --arch=x86_64

make

sudo make install

Build freetype:

./configure --target=x86_64-Darwin

make

sudo make install

Build mplayer:

./configure --target=x86_64-Darwin --enable-menu

make

sudo make install

Now, you should have a native 64-bit /usr/local/bin/mplayer:


danny@mirror ~ [1] % file /usr/local/bin/mplayer


/usr/local/bin/mplayer: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64


danny@mirror ~ [2] %


Success!