Even though Mplayer is able to play RMVB by binary codec, sometimes it may not work as expect due to something weird as follow.

mplayer: symbol lookup error: /share/apps/codecs/drvc.so: undefined symbol: pthread_mutexattr_init

Fortunately, it has a workaround for this issue.

According to the latest version in the trunk, Mplayer does support various codec for realvid.

$ mplayer -vc help|grep realvid
3DNow supported but disabled
3DNowExt supported but disabled
rv3040      realvid   working   Linux RealPlayer 10 RV30/40 decoder  [drvc.so]
rv3040win   realvid   working   Win32 RealPlayer 10 RV30/40 decoder  [drvc.dll]
rv40        realvid   working   Linux RealPlayer 9 RV40 decoder  [drv4.so.6.0]
rv40win     realvid   working   Win32 RealPlayer 9 RV40 decoder  [drv43260.dll]
rv40mac     realvid   working   Mac OS X RealPlayer 9 RV40 decoder  [drvc.bundle/Contents/MacOS/drvc]
rv30        realvid   working   Linux RealPlayer 8 RV30 decoder  [drv3.so.6.0]
rv30win     realvid   working   Win32 RealPlayer 8 RV30 decoder  [drv33260.dll]
rv30mac     realvid   working   Mac OS X RealPlayer 9 RV30 decoder  [drvc.bundle/Contents/MacOS/drvc]
rv20        realvid   working   Linux RealPlayer 8 RV20 decoder  [drv2.so.6.0]
rv20winrp10 realvid   working   Win32 RealPlayer 10 RV20 decoder  [drv2.dll]
rv20win     realvid   working   Win32 RealPlayer 8 RV20 decoder  [drv23260.dll]
rv20mac     realvid   working   Mac OS X RealPlayer 9 RV20 decoder  [drv2.bundle/Contents/MacOS/drv2]

The default codec is rv3040 which might not work correctly on some machines but you may override video codec using -vc option.

mplayer -vc rv40 video.rmvb

Tags: mplayer, rmvb, realvid