Bug#544681: mplayer: please add libmad support

[Diego Biurrun]

On Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 02:25:21PM +0400, Nikita V. Youshchenko wrote:
> 
> Debian mplayer package is built without libmad support.
> Libmad is a fixed-point audio mpeg decoder.1
> Without libmad support, mplayer can't be used on slow armel devices that 
> lack hardware FPU, such as the Freerunner.

False.

FFmpeg contains a fixed-point MP3 decoder that is much faster than
libmad and already available to MPlayer without adding an unnecessary
libmad dependency.

> Package from debian-multimedia.org is built with libmad support, and it 
> works in Freerunner much better.
> Since libmad is available in debian main, please enable libmad support in 
> the official debian mplayer package.

The real problem is that the Ubuntu MPlayer package (and possibly
others) contains the following bad config file entry ..

  # Specify default audio codec (see -ac help for a list).
  ac=mad,

.. which results in libmad getting preferred over other MP3 decoders,
upsetting the default we are using (for a good reason) at upstream.

That's why you falsely believe that you should be using libmad when
ffmp3 is much better.  For the freerunner you should simply prefer
ffmp3 over mp3lib.

Diego