About

Yes. Yet another movie player for linux.
What is the special with this? It works, at least for me :)
I've tried lots of players under linux (mtv, xmps, dvdview, livid/oms, VideoLAN, xine, xanim, avifile, xmmp) but they all have a few problems. Usually with special files or with audio/video sync. Most of them are unable to play mpeg1, mpeg2 AND avi (DivX) files. Many players have image quality or speed problems too. So I've decided to write/modify one...

Short history:

  • mpg12play v0.1 was born, using libmpeg3 by Adam Williams
  • mpg12play 2nd generation (v0.5-), using dvdview by Dirk Farin
  • mpg12play 3nd generation (v0.9-), using libmpeg2 ( mpeg2dec) by Aaron Holtzman and Michel Lespinasse
  • MPlayer was born, containing mpg12play 0.90pre5 and a new simple avi player based on code from avifile library
  • MPlayer 0.10, mpeg and avi player in a single binary
  • MPlayer 0.11 release is getting closer day-by-day. Massive fixes, tons of new features (for example ASF playing) !

    As you see, I didn't write any codecs, just some players. I spent a lot of time finding the best way to parse damaged input files (both mpeg and avi) and to do perfect A-V sync with seeking ability. My player is rock solid playing damaged mpeg files (useful for some VCDs), and it plays bad AVI files which are unplayable with the famous windows media player. Even AVI files without index chunk are playable! As you see, stability and quality are the most important things for me, speed has lower priority, but is still very important.

    What about the GUI?
    I'm not a GUI programmer. I hate GUIs, I like the pure black 80x25 console. So the player has only keyboard control from the controlling console/xterm now. There is a GUI being developed for the player, coordinated by Pontscho/Fresh! It's still under development, but it will be merged and released soon. BTW he needs some nice skins, if you are a good graphician, contact him!

    Win32 codecs?
    Yes, we use Win32 (Video for Windows, DirectShow) codecs for AVI decoding. They must be installed to /usr/lib/win32 directory, with all lower case. You can grab the codecs package from here or can be found in your C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM dir, see codecs.conf for filenames.

    Supported input formats:

  • VCD (Video CD) directly from CD-ROM or from CDRwin's .bin image file
  • MPEG 1/2 System Stream (PS) and Elementary Stream (ES) file formats
  • RIFF AVI file format
  • ASF v1.0 files (most bugs fixed!)

    Supported audio & video formats:
    Check DOCS/CODECS or here.

    Supported output devices:

  • Matrox G200/G400 hardware YUV overlay via the mga_vid device
  • Matrox G200/G400 overlay (mga_vid) in X11 window (Xv emulation)
  • syncfb output (Synchronized YUV support on Matrox G400)
  • X11 with Xv extension (YUV & scale support)
  • X11 XImage optionally with SHM extension
  • OpenGL renderer, requires Utah-GLX (DRI or nVidia's shit doesn't work!)
  • X11 DGA extension
  • X11 DGA extension with fullscreen software (SLOW!) scaling
  • SDL >= v1.1.7 driver (supports software scaling, and versions >=1.1.8 even support Xvideo, thus hardware rendering) (NOT supported by us! Don't submit SDL bugreports! By default: don't compile)
  • General framebuffers
  • SVGAlib output
  • Null output (for speed tests)
  • 3dfx hardware YUV support (not yet tested, maybe broken)
  • OpenDivX AVI file writer
  • PGM file output (for testing purposes?)
  • MD5sum output (for mpeg conformance tests)
    NOTE: check DOCS/VIDEOCARDS !
    NOTE: not all are available for AVI files

    Supported audio output devices:

  • OSS driver
  • ALSA driver with OSS emulation (NOT recommended, causes annoying delays)
  • ESD with the esddsp utility (not tested)

    NOTE: check DOCS/SOUNDCARDS !

    Speed:
    Most of time-critical parts are optimized for MMX/SSE/3DNow!.
    You can improve rendering speed by setting up MTRR registers, see doc in MTRR.
    Some benchmark results can be found in the doc file SPEED.

    License:
    Since MPlayer incorporates a lot of code from other projects, this isn't decided yet.
    We're going for GPL (will be pretty hard, though).

    TV output:
    If you have a Matrox G400 Dual-Head card, you can watch movies on TV, using TV-out feature of the second head. You must have matroxfb support enabled in your kernel (2.4.x kernels). You don't need X11 for this!

    Sending bugreports:
    First please read all the docs in the package, most of problems are described somewhere. At least read the Troubleshooting section! We don't like answering questions which are already answered in the README or other docs.
    You should try the latest test (pre) release version too, maybe your bug is already fixed, but the new version hasn't been released.
    If you couldn't solve the problem, then send us a quality bugreport via the MPlayer-users mailing list.

    Mailing lists:
    There are three public mailing lists on MPlayer. Subscribing can be achieved on the following addresses:
    MPlayer-users:     http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mplayer-users
    MPlayer-announce: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mplayer-announce
    MPlayer-Matrox-users: http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/mplayer-matrox MPlayer CVS-log: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mplayer-cvslog

    Standard Disclaimer:
    Use only at your own risk! There may be errors and inaccuracies that could be damaging to your system or your eye. Proceed with caution, and although this is highly unlikely, I don't take any responsibility for that!

    And finally here is my S P A M trap: Send Unwanted Mails Here to be rejected by our mail server.