As distributed, MPlayer on slackware-15 -stable does not read the file "xxx.conf" while trying to play "xxx". It works on the 14.2 slackware-current, and the version of MPlayer is the same on both systems. Variables in the .conf file work correctly if entered on a command line. Diffing the "ldd" output on the two systems yields the following results:

diff ldd.14.2 ldd.15.stable
138c138
< libndr.so.1
---
> libndr.so.2
204d203
< libutil-cmdline-samba4.so
215c214
< libvpx.so.6
---
> libvpx.so.7

This after stripping off the => part of ldd output and sorting.

A "...samba4.so" is referred to in an "ldd" of libndr but the version used in -current is part of samba-4.14.7. Slackware-15 uses samba-4.15.5 which does not include this library. Clearly some reconfiguration of something is needed to link with an appropriate library.

As a workaround I wrote an "awk" script to read the .conf file and run a command-line invocation of mplayer (or gmplayer). Works fine.

But be aware there is Thunar magic (if you use xfce4 like I do) that makes it hard to run a script named "gmplayer" without Thunar calling /usr/bin/gmplayer directly (which ignores the ,conf file)

If a fix for this is a long time in coming, I'll post the awk script, but it really needs to get fixed somewhere upstream.

Works here on 15.0.
That makes me wonder if you haven't lost "use-filedir-conf=yes" from your 14.2 configuration files.

1 members found this post helpful.

I bet that is it. That line should be in ~/.mplayer/config. I use per-file .conf files to set special options for some bad video files, such as clipping off black bars, setting the correct aspect ratio, deinterlacing, and applying a smoothing filter. I always use mplayer to play video, so I'm glad slackware has it.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks (and a tip of the Hatlo hat, if you are old enough to remember that) to the replyers. I was using the distributed config file, and indeed the 14.2 config file dating from 2018 had the line in question. The reference to it is on line 276 of the man file, and I'm afraid my eyes glazed over before I got that far! So all is now well.