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Tuesday 07th of September 2010

MPlayer

MPlayer is a movie player for Linux (runs on many other Unices, and non-x86 CPUs). It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, PVA, Matroska files, supported by many native, XAnim, RealPlayer, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch Video CD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, RealMedia, Sorenson, Theora, and MPEG-4 (DivX) movies, too. MPlayer supports a wide range of output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, libcaca, DirectFB, GGI and SDL (and this way all their drivers) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and Radeon, Mach64, Permedia3). MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the DVB and DXR3/Hollywood+ and antialiased shaded subtitles (14 supported types) with European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic, Korean fonts, and the onscreen display (OSD).

The 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, and you can temporarily rebuild their indexes with the -idx option, or permanently with MEncoder, thus enabling seeking! As you see, stability and quality are the most important things, but the speed is also amazing. There is also a powerful filter system for video and audio manipulation.

MEncoder (MPlayer's Movie Encoder) is a simple movie encoder, designed to encode MPlayer-playable movies AVI/ASF/OGG/DVD/VCD/VOB/MPG/MOV/VIV/FLI/RM/NUV/NET/PVA to other MPlayer-playable formats (see below). It can encode with various codecs, like MPEG-4 (DivX4) (one or two passes), libavcodec, PCM/MP3/VBR MP3 audio.

Supported Input Formats

  • (S)VCD (Super Video CD)
  • CDRwin's .bin image file
  • DVD, including encrypted DVD
  • MPEG-1/2 (ES/PS/PES/VOB)
  • RIFF AVI file format
  • ASF/WMV/WMA format
  • QT/MOV/MP4 format
  • RealAudio/RealVideo format
  • Ogg/OGM files
  • Matroska
  • NUT
  • NSV (Nullsoft Streaming Video)
  • VIVO format
  • FLI format
  • NuppelVideo format
  • yuv4mpeg format
  • FILM (.cpk) format
  • RoQ format
  • PVA format
  • Streaming via HTTP/FTP, RTP/RTSP, MMS/MMST, MPST, SDP
  • TV grabbing

Supported video codecs:

  • MPEG-1 (VCD) and MPEG-2 (SVCD/DVD/DVB) video
  • MPEG-4 ASP in all variants including DivX ;-), OpenDivX (DivX4), DivX 5 (Pro), Xvid
  • MPEG-4 AVC aka H.264
  • Windows Media Video 7/8 (WMV1/2)
  • Windows Media Video 9 (WMV3) (using x86 DLL)
  • RealVideo 1.0, 2.0 (G2)
  • RealVideo 3.0 (RP8), 4.0 (RP9) (using Real libraries)
  • Sorenson v1/v3 (SVQ1/SVQ3), Cinepak, RPZA and other QuickTime codecs
  • DV video
  • 3ivx
  • Intel Indeo3 (3.1, 3.2)
  • Intel Indeo 4.1 and 5.0 (using x86 DLL or XAnim codecs)
  • VIVO 1.0, 2.0, I263 and other H.263(+) variants (using x86 DLL)
  • MJPEG, AVID, VCR2, ASV2 and other hardware formats
  • FLI/FLC
  • HuffYUV
  • various old simple RLE-like formats

Supported audio codecs:

  • MPEG layer 1, 2, and 3 (MP3) audio
  • AC3/A52 (Dolby Digital) audio (software or SP/DIF)
  • AAC (MPEG-4 audio)
  • WMA (DivX Audio) v1, v2
  • WMA 9 (WMAv3), Voxware audio, ACELP.net  (using x86 DLLs)
  • RealAudio: COOK, SIPRO, ATRAC3 (using Real libraries)
  • RealAudio: DNET and older codecs
  • QuickTime: Qclp, Q-Design QDMC/QDM2, MACE 3/6 (using QT libraries), ALAC
  • Ogg Vorbis audio
  • VIVO audio (g723, Vivo Siren) (using x86 DLL)
  • alaw/ulaw, (ms)gsm, pcm, *adpcm and other simple old audio formats

Supported Video Output Devices (general)

  • x11: X11 with SHM extension
  • xv: X11 using overlays with the Xvideo extension (hardware YUV & scaling)
  • xvmc: Xvideo Motion Compensation
  • vidix: VIDeo Interface for *niX
  • xvidix: VIDIX in an X11 window
  • cvidix: VIDIX on the console
  • winvidix: VIDIX under Windows
  • dga: X11 DGA extension (both v1.0 and v2.0)
  • gl: OpenGL renderer
  • gl2: alternative OpenGL renderer (with multiple textures)
  • fbdev: framebuffer output
  • svga: SVGAlib output (supports EGA displays)
  • sdl: SDL >= v1.1.7 driver
  • ggi: GGI graphics output
  • aalib: text mode rendering
  • caca: text mode rendering in color
  • vesa: display through the VESA BIOS (also needed for Radeon TV-out)
  • directfb: DirectFB support
  • directx: native Windows DirectX output driver
  • quartz: native Mac OS X output driver

Supported Video Output Devices (Card Specific)

  • mga: Matrox G200/G400/G450/G550 hardware YUV overlay via the mga_vid device
  • xmga: Matrox G200/G400/G450/G550 overlay (mga_vid) in X11 window (Xv emulation on X 3.3.x!)
  • syncfb: Matrox G400 YUV support on framebuffer
  • 3dfx: Voodoo 3/Banshee hardware YUV support (/dev/3dfx)
  • tdfxfb: Voodoo 3/Banshee hardware YUV support on tdfx framebuffer
  • mpegpes: support for Siemens DVB hardware MPEG-1/2 decoder boards (or MPEG-PES file output)
  • dxr2: support for DXR2 hardware MPEG-1/2 decoder boards
  • dxr3: support for DXR3/Hollywood+ hardware MPEG-1/2 decoder boards
  • zr: support for Zoran360[56]7 based hardware MJPEG cards

Supported Audio Output Devices

  • OSS (Open Sound System) - factory standard under UNIX
  • SDL (Simple Directmedia Layer) - wrapper library with support for various systems
  • ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) 0.5/0.9/1.0 for Linux
  • SUN audio driver for BSD and Solaris8/9 users
  • SGI audio for IRIX
  • Mac OS X audio
  • Windows audio
  • NAS (Network Audio System)
  • ESD (ESound Daemon)
  • ARTS (KDE Sound System)
  • JACK (Jack Audio Connection Kit)

Many Linux distributions now include a version of MPlayer in their own native package manager format (.rpm, .deb, etc.)

 

Using Yum to install MPlayer

start a terminal and type the following at the shell prompt:


 
# yum install mplayer

 

Using Apt to install mplayer

start a terminal and type the following at the shell prompt:

# apt-get install mplayer
or 
# sudo apt-get install mplayer

Using Urpmi to install mplayer

start a terminal and type the following at the shell prompt:

# urpmi mplayer

Other Open Source Multimedia Players
 

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