How-To: Compile and Install SMPlayer 0.6.2 in Ubuntu 8.04 'Hardy Heron'

Using the MPlayer engine, SMPlayer is a powerful video player built in Qt4, with support for playing DVDs, DVD ISO images, a configurable interface, icon themes, the very useful feature of remembering settings and time left from a video after closing it (so when you restart SMPlayer the movie will be loaded from where you left it), support for subtitles and much more. SMPlayer lately gained a lot of popularity and I'm sure it will become one of the most used video players on Linux, if it's not already.

The last version of SMPlayer is 0.6.2, however the Ubuntu Hardy repositories include only 0.6.0, so in order to compile from source and install the last version of SMPlayer, you'll have to follow several easy steps explained below.


1. Make sure you have the sources repositories enabled
Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file as root and make sure you have a line which says something like:

deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse

Then, don't forget to update the packages list:

sudo apt-get update

2. Install the tools needed to compile it and the development libraries

sudo apt-get build-dep smplayer

This command will install the development libraries, together with the necessary tools to compile, like the build-essential meta package for example (if not already installed).

3. Download the source and uncompress it
Next, download the SMPlayer source tarball from here and uncompress it using:

tar -xjf smplayer-0.6.2.tar.bz2

4. Compile and install SMPlayer 0.6.2
Change the working directory to smplayer-0.6.2 and issue the following commands:

make QMAKE=/usr/share/qt4/bin/qmake

To install it:

sudo make install

SMPlayer should be now installed in /usr/local/bin/smplayer (use whereis smplayer to find it).

Updated: Sep 12, 2008