mplayer crashes with illegal instruction on a non-altivec enabled processor

[Rogério Theodoro de Brito]

Binary package hint: mplayer

Hi.

mplayer 2:1.0~rc3+svn20090426-1ubuntu10.1 (from karmic) crashes on my PowerPC with a SIGILL (signal 4) in init_video_coded on my father's G3 computer.

I have not yet investigated, but I would bet that this is because it is compiled with altivec enabled, while the computer does not have that (this is similar to compiling a program requiring SSE4.1 to run on generic i686 computers).

Is there any possibility of providing two packages, one compiled with altivec and other compiled without? I can provide patches, if desired.

Regards, Rogério Brito.

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

does mplayer profit from altivec?

ffmpeg does e.g. install a non-altivec version to /usr/lib, and an
altivec enabled version to /usr/lib/altivec. Mplayer itself should do
similar, i.e., the /usr/bin/mplayer binary without altivec and move all
code that benefit from altivec to shared libraries in /usr/lib{,/altivec}

patches for that are indeed welcome!

--
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4

[Rogério Theodoro de Brito (rbrito)]

Hi, Reinhard.

I don't have my G3 working right now (I hope to have it fixed very soon), but, if I recall correctly, the MPEG2 video part of ffmpeg/mplayer had some handwritten altivec stuff.

As soon as I get that machine to work again, I will work on this, if you don't beat me to it.

Regards.

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

On Thu, Sep 02, 2010 at 10:15:43 (CEST), Rogério Theodoro de Brito wrote:

> Hi, Reinhard.
>
> I don't have my G3 working right now (I hope to have it fixed very
> soon), but, if I recall correctly, the MPEG2 video part of
> ffmpeg/mplayer had some handwritten altivec stuff.

yes, but both ffmpeg and mplayer offer a configure option to avoid
emiting altivec code. Disabling altivec in the mplayer package
completely is probably going to make all G4 users very unhappy.

> As soon as I get that machine to work again, I will work on this, if you
> don't beat me to it.

thanks!

--
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4