![]() You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies.Īnother great feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. When MPlayer is running, you can control it using the keyboard.MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems (see the documentation). The simplest way to start MPlayer is just mplayer moviename.mov. Let’s start by looking at MPlayer on the command line, no GUI at all. For reference, it took about 15 to 20 minutes on an otherwise idle dual-Xeon 3.20GHz system with 8GB of RAM. Note that it will take a few minutes to compile, even on a faster system. If you do want to compile MPlayer from scratch, you can find the instructions in the README file or more detailed instructions in the documentation. The download page does have fairly recent snapshots of the code pulled from the Subversion tree, but I’d feel a lot better about directing users to known-good releases and not asking them to build from scratch. The MPlayer project doesn’t seem to do proper releases anymore - the last announcement from the MPlayer project was in 2007 for a 1.0 release candidate. For example, MPlayer may not have support for any “restricted” codecs, or some other features may not be compiled in. ![]() The problem with grabbing packages from the distros is that they may not compile in all of the features that MPlayer is capable of. If you’re looking for a package for your favorite distro, or Amiga, Zaurus, and even the TomTom GPS, then you’ll find them there. The MPlayer project doesn’t supply pre-built binaries for Linux, but points to packages built by the distros themselves or packaged by others for specific distros and OSes. ![]() Just look for the mplayer and smplayer packages. MPlayer should be packaged for most major Linux distros. Specifically, MPlayer and DVD menus don’t get along so well. When trying MPlayer from packages and compiling from source, I did have a bit of a problem trying to watch commercial DVDs. I suspect there’s a secret option for playing back video on your toaster, but I haven’t found it yet or I have an incompatible toaster, and I’m leaning towards incompatible toaster. If you want to watch QuickTime, Windows Media, H.264, RealVideo, Theora, etc., you should be able to with MPlayer. I won’t go into all of the formats supported by MPlayer, but it does handle pretty much all the codecs that you’d run into today. In short, if flexibility is your watchword, MPlayer is the tool to choose. Everything from the standard X11 out to support for text mode rendering, drivers for Mac OS X and Windows, and a slew of specific video cards and sound cards as well. It also spits out video to a ridiculous number of devices. It handles a gob of input formats and codecs. MPlayer is sort of the Swiss Army Chainsaw of media players. But for those who are willing to roll up their sleeves and dig in, MPlayer makes a fine video player. It’s extremely capable and can be tamed with one of the many GUIs available (MPlayer, that is), but it’s got quite a bit of complexity and can be less than user-friendly at times. Typically, I wouldn’t recommend MPlayer for new Linux users any more than I’d recommend Vim for folks who just want to edit a few lines of text. It has options galore and has the flexibility to play almost anything under the sun. It’s a multi-platform codec-chewing monster truck of a video player for the connoisseur of video players. MPlayer is not your run-of-the mill video player.
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