mplayer - Cannot find codec for audio format 0x6134706D

mplayer is awesome!

 
I've been happily living with mplayer leveraging vdpau on my Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS. Until today that is, when I tried to play videos from my SLR, and there was no audio. Upon close look, mplayer was complaining thusly:

FAAD: Failed to initialize the decoder!
ADecoder init failed :(
[aac @ 0x4442a60]Audio object type 0 is not supported.
Could not open codec.
ADecoder init failed :(
Cannot find codec for audio format 0x6134706D.

I did STFW, and tried a couple of things, none of those worked for me. That's when I decided to give mplayer2 a try. mplayer2 is a fork of mplayer, I had read elsewhere that it contains a number of features not available in the original MPlayer.

Since I use vdpau, the mplayer2 website indicated that it'd be a better bet for me:

Much better support for VDPAU functionality

• Removed limitations that prevented switching frames more than once per monitor refresh. With MPlayer2 you can play high-FPS content or use fast forward on a 60 Hz monitor without breaking playback.
• Added support for the frame timing functionality of VDPAU.
• Improved performance by better buffer handling and smarter subtitle texture uploads (both VDPAU hardware decoding and displaying software decoded video with VDPAU perform better).
• Added logic to reduce frame timing jitter in some situations.
• Handle frames added by deinterlacing properly.
• Several bugfixes.
• Various minor improvements (studio level output support, set default deinterlace mode, ...)

Installing mplayer2 on  Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 

Here's how I found to install mplayer2 on ubuntu 10.04 LTS:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ripps818/coreavc
$  sudo apt-get update 
$  sudo apt-get install mplayer2 

For reference, here's my ~/.mplayer2/config file. (See archlinux wiki on more about these entries..)

$ cat ~/.mplayer2/config  
# Write your default config options here!
vo=vdpau,
vc=ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffodivxvdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,ffvc1vdpau,

mplayer2 and 0x6134706D

mplayer2 seem to be able to play all those files mplayer was complaining about. I think I like the vdpau quality better with mplayer2, or it could just be a phsycological placebo effect!

Either way, I love mplayer, and mplayer2!