SMPlayer-portable - v21.8.0

[mikewalsh]

Morning, gang.

Having read peppyy's post, earlier this evening, about the SMPlayer v21.8.0 AppImage he found over at Sourceforge:-

viewtopic.php?f=88&t=4109

....I thought I'd take a closer look at it, and see why it WAS so big. So I stripped the AppImage down via use of the "--appimage-extract" argument, and did some investigating....

Turns out it comes with an awful lot of redundant dependencies & stuff, in the /lib directory,, that most 64-bit Puppies have built-in already. Thus, I've removed more than 200 MB of extraneous items - unpacked in /tmp, the AppImage is almost 350 MB in size! - and pretty much just left the Qt 5.14 items that it needs to run, indicating the need to use these by means of an "LD_LIBRARY_PATH" clause in the 'LAUNCH' script. These are definitely needed, since even Fossapup64 only has Qt 5.12 as standard.....and Qt5-powered apps are way fussier about exact versions than Qt4-powered ones ever were.

(I'm afraid this isn't as small as @norgo manages to craft them. No 'static' compiling here, I'm sorry to say; my own compiling is abysmal, never mind the fancy stuff! )

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Having done that, I re-built the AppImage by the use of Fred's scripts. I then built a 'portable' version of SMPlayer 21.8.0 in my now 'standard' layout; this keeps the config stuff within its own directory, sym-linking it out to the expected locations at run-time. The sym-links are then removed again at close.

As always, d/l; unzip; put it wherever you like.....preferably outside the 'save'. Scripts are included, as usual, to permit adding a Menu entry if one is required, firing it up from wherever it's located. The "MenuReadMe" explains how to use these.

So far, this has been tested, and found to work in, Fossapup64, Bionicpup64, and Xenialpup64. It may run in others, too; won't hurt nothing to try.

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If anyone's interested, you can find SMPlayer-'portable' at the following link:-

https://mega.nz/folder/nbIzWQhZ#o5PD7yYR52a4B40VLNwxCQ

Any issues, etc, drop me a line. Feedback is appreciated, as always.

Credits to @peppyy for finding this at Sourceforge in the first place. I actually tried building one of these a couple of weeks ago, but couldn't make it behave itself, so I gave it up as a bad job. Good things always come to those who wait.....

Enjoy!

Mike.

[norgo]

Fossapup has Qt5 libs included, there is no inflated Appimage needed.
SMplayer for Fossapup added smplayer-21.8.0-qt5-x86_64.pet

[mikewalsh]

@norgo :-

Fossapup has Qt5 libs included, there is no inflated Appimage needed.
SMplayer for Fossapup added smplayer-21.8.0-qt5-x86_64.pet

Oh, I agree, mate. Under normal circumstances, yes; your small, pre-built packages take up far less room.....but even you will agree with me, you ARE having to virtually 'custom-build' for every individual Pup. I've seen how many packages you have to keep in your repo!

The only real advantage of this is the ability to run it from, say, a flash drive; transfer it from one Puppy to another.....and it still works. But plenty of folks will still prefer your packages, I guarantee that. Even me.

(Like I said, I was curious to see just why this AppImage WAS so big. The sheer amount of excess stuff that was included was unreal. And, I confess; I have so much in the way of resources to play with these days - 32GB RAM, 5+ TB of storage - that I'm no longer a typical Puppian any more. And indeed, peppyy's in the same kind of resource bracket as myself; where most folks will jib at something that uses perhaps more than 40-50MB, he & I won't think twice about using 2-300 MB to perform the same task. I have to kick myself hard to remind myself that most Puppy users are running on far older, smaller amounts of resources than I..... )

It's just a demonstration, TBH, of what can be found out there, what's available.....and what CAN be done (if you don't care how much RAM/storage you use in the process!)

Mike.

[peppyy]

@mikewalsh I agree. So many appimages are really overinflated. To combine so much together and expect it to run on so many different distributions is a tough thing to do. I have been testing for a long time, however until I had modern, (or at least fairly recent hardware) I would shy away from anything that wasn't distro specific. I was fortunate to have a good friend who donated parts from his old gaming machine, otherwise I would have looked the other way.

I was simply trying to do a "Fair" comparison to what was available and I was impressed at all it could do without having to sort out libraries etc. To my amazement on my current machine it was very efficent, to the point I couldn't detect any higher processor usage for what I was doing. In fact it was lower than about half the other apps I had tried.
I have tried several other appimages like Haruna-0.5-x86_64.AppImage only to find that they were basically something I already had (fancy mpv) etc.

It is good to know that we have so many folks that have already compiled these apps for many versions of Puppy and we have others who are recompiling the newer versions for those to come. 10 years ago I was pretty active in solving problems (or creating new ones) though as I age, I am finding it difficult to keep up with modern technology. Sometimes even simply typing and punctuation.

[Amol]

Hello again mikewalsh !
Your portable smplayer runs great for me.THAKKS !!!

[amethyst]

Just a mention - There is an old SMPlayer (7MB download) for 32-bit Puppys which seem to work with all 32-bit Puppys I have old and new. MPlayer needs to be installed though. https://www.dropbox.com/s/jvnrs6ld6cpyn ... 6.pet?dl=1

[mikewalsh]

Just a mention - There is an old SMPlayer (7MB download) for 32-bit Puppys which seem to work with all 32-bit Puppys I have old and new. MPlayer needs to be installed though. https://www.dropbox.com/s/jvnrs6ld6cpyn ... 6.pet?dl=1

I was about to say that's gotta be 0.6.8.....originally built for Lucid, I believe. I've had that one kicking around in my "toybox" for quite a few years, IIRC, and yes; it did seem to work on pretty much any of the older Puppies I used to play around with.

Bloody useful for those with limited resources, I'll be the first to admit..!

Mike.