Mplayer

See also: AV Software

Home Page: http://www.mplayerhq.hu

Acronym: Media Player

License: GPL

Very handy multimedia player/ripper for Unix. The homepage says the website is closing because mplayer violates numerous patents. The software is still available for download but may soon become harder to find.

MPlayer is a video player for Linux (runs on many other Unices, and non-x86 CPUs, see the documentation). It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, VIVO, ASF/WMV, QT/MOV, FLI, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, OGG and some RealMedia files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, FLI, and even DivX movies too (and you don’t need the avifile library at all!). Another big feature of Mplayer is the wide range of supported output drivers.
It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, FBdev, AAlib, SDL (and this way all drivers of SDL), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X!), some lowlevel card-specific drivers for Matrox, 3Dfx, Radeon and NVidia and many, many others. Most of them supports software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy video in fullscreen. MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the DVB and DXR3/Hollywood+! And what about the nice big antialiased shaded subtitles (9 supported types) with european/ISO 8859-1,2 (hungarian, english, czech, etc), cyrillic, korean fonts, and OSD?

Mplayer has a number of GUI skins as well. Check out it’s documentation. These skins allow Mplayer to fast forward / rewind, change columes and more easily take advantage of it’s playlist.

3rd party support for RTSP is here available. It also runs on Amiga, Windows, OSX via 3rd party ports.

Example use of mplayer to record a DVD to DivX format (with MP3 audio):

  1. !/bin/sh
  1. add to the end of each line, except the last… wiki got angry with them

mencoder

-vop scale=720:540

-dvd 1

-o dvd.avi

-alang en

-oac mp3lame

-ovc lavc

-lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2000

Lots of good examples and details in the man page, as well.

Related


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