When I emerge media-video/smpeg-xmms xmms just segfaults. I don't have a clue about why it's happening. I don't know if I'm the only one, so I'm mailing this just so you know about it. Thus as far as I can tell, don't use the smpeg plugin for xmms, it'll make it hang.
I believe I've found the cause. The problem appears to lie in libsdl and smpeg not smpeg-xmms itself. When SDL is compiled, --enable-video-x11-xv is set to "yes" by default. However, when smpeg is compiled using a version of SDL that has video-x11-xv enabled, MPEG output is does not work properly (at least not on my machine). In particular, any program that uses smpeg to play MPEG clips (such as plaympeg, a command line utility that comes with smpeg) will play the audio of the clip (if any) fine, but video output appears as a blue square (taking a lesson or two from Windows, perhaps?). Whatever is causing this behaviour also seems to cause smpeg-xmms to cause xmms to segfault when started. When video-x11-xv is not enabled in SDL, plaympeg (and presumably also other programs, such as xmps) display the movie properly (no blue square of death), and xmms loads without trouble when smpeg-xmms is installed. To disable video-x11-xv, I added the following line below the USE tests in libsdl-1.2.3.ebuild: myconf="${myconf} --disable-video-x11-xv" Ideally though, this should depend on a USE variable. I don't know what exactly video-x11-xv is and why it would be useful, so it may be that a better solution would be to get video-x11-xv in SDL to work instead of simply disabling it. Lastly, I found that both plaympeg and smpeg-xmms would segfault if smpeg was installed with the "mmx" USE variable set, on a PIII mobile 700. Removing mmx from my USE variable in /etc/make.conf seems to have solved the problem. After installing SDL without video-x11-xv and smpeg without mmx, I reinstalled smpeg-xmms (to be on the safe side) and ran xmms, which seems to work fine, playing movies without problems.
I experienced this same problem. Digging into the SDL tar, I ./configure --help and see --enable-video-x11-xv use X11 XvImage extension for video [default=yes] Now I don't know what the XvImage stuff is :) In case it becomes important, i have an athlon and an nvidia card, running nvidia drivers.
Laurent and Martin: What video card/drivers do you happen to be using?
ok, added "xv" USE variable.
I'm using a Rage Pro Mobility 1 on my dell laptop (PIII 650) and a GeForce 3 Ti500 on my Duron 900. I don't know about xv, but using it with mplayer is fine... Same for mmx.
