MPlayer

MPlayer is a popular media player for Linux and other operating systems, that plays a very large variety of audio and video file formats (MPEG, VOB, AVI, OGG/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs, VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and more).

In contrast to other media players such as xine, MPlayer is primarily a command-line tool, although a graphical interface called gmplayer is available. Mplayer also comes with mencoder, an encoding tool that generates many of the video formats that MPlayer supports.

''Note: MPlayer does not support the DVDNAV software that plays DVD menus. For menued DVD playback, an alternative player such as vlc must be used.''

= Installing MPlayer = To build mplayer, you need to install its dependencies first, also the software to download ("checkout") the source. For a default installation of SUSE Linux 11.3 this goes like this: yast -i subversion gcc-c++ automake autoconf make yasm zlib-devel gtk2-devel xorg-x11-devel
 * open a console as root and enter:

Then you will be able to download, compile, link and install mplayer and its GUI like this: svn co svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer cd mplayer ./configure --enable-gui && make -j4 && make install

If you get errors and do not know what to do, read Compiling software.

= Using MPlayer =

Invoking MPlayer
To get graphical navigation means, call

$ gmplayer

The simplest way to invoke mplayer is just to call the command with a video file, e.g.

$ mplayer myvideo.avi

To start MPlayer in a fullscreen window, use

$ mplayer -fs myvideo.avi

If you're having difficulty launching mplayer using the suggestion above, try invoking it like this

$ mplayer -vo x11 myvideo.avi

DVD Playback
As mentioned above, MPlayer does not support the playback of DVD menus. To play the first title on a DVD, use

$ mplayer dvd://

If the first title is not the main movie, try playing other titles: $ mplayer dvd://2 $ mplayer dvd://3

Playback control
The following key commands can be used during playback to control MPlayer. (see /usr/share/mplayer/input.conf)

= Configuring MPlayer =

MPlayer is configured through a number of configuration files, including /etc/mplayer.conf

= TroubleShooting =

New_Face failed
Symptome: When calling gmplayer, you get a pop-up saying "New_Face failed. Maybe the font path is wrong. Please supply the text font file (~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf)".

Reason: You have not installed mplayer's fonts.

Solution: Do as advised, point your konqueror to fonts:///, select a font you like and copy it to ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf.

= References =