How-To: Compile and Install SMPlayer from Source in Debian Lenny

SMPlayer uses the mplayer engine for displaying videos and it's one of the most powerful and popular video players out there. Built using the Qt 4 toolkit, SMPlayer offers great features and it's highly customisable.

The latest version is 0.6.7, which brings experimental support for DVD menus and several other improvements and bug fixes over the previous release, 0.6.6. Here are several steps to follow in order to build SMPlayer from source in Debian Lenny:

1. Enable the sources repositories
Edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file as root with your favourite text editor (e.g. nano /etc/apt/sources.list or kdesu /etc/apt/sources.list) and make sure you have a line which starts with deb-src, as in the example below:

deb-src ftp://ftp.ro.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

You can replace the TLD with the one of your country (e.g. instead of ro use fi for Finland, de for Germany etc.) Next, update the packages list as root:

apt-get update

2. Install the needed dependencies
As root, type:

apt-get build-dep smplayer
apt-get install devscripts

This will install the tools needed to build SMPlayer and also the development libraries on which it depends.

3. Download the source tarball and uncompress it
Get the latest source for SMPlayer (which is 0.6.7 at the time of writing) from the official website (the file is called smplayer-0.6.7.tar.bz2). To uncompress it, make sure the current working directory is the one where you saved the source and type:

tar -xjf smplayer-0.6.7.tar.bz2

4. Compile and install SMPlayer
Change the working directory to smplayer-0.6.7 and issue the commands:

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

And to install it type as root:

make install

This should be all. SMPlayer should be inside /usr/local/bin/smplayer.