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Media Movies Software

MPlayer 1.0Pre1 Is Here 363

Posted by timothy from the everything-and-then-some dept.
bfree writes "Now on your favourite mplayer mirror you can find the 1.0Pre1 release of Mplayer! While work is underway on a second-generation version of Mplayer, I have already fired off emails to my Windows-based friends to let them now that the one player to rule them all now has (preview) support for their OS (I've only looked at a precompiled command line version on Windows but it handled everything I threw at it so far except DVDs). Big changes include Windows (via mingw32 and cygwin) ports, as well as Mac OS X (with extra-accurate Darwin timers). Now if only all those legal questions would go away, perhaps we could have a new killer Free Software application to save people installing Real, Quicktime and Windows Media Player (on Linux!?) or perhaps it's the one application to finally tell the **AA where the world wants to go today!"
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MPlayer 1.0Pre1 Is Here More

MPlayer 1.0Pre1 Is Here

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  • Whoa (Score:2, Funny)

    by jabbadabbadoo ( 599681 )
    "one player to rule them all."

    Let us not hope Sauron - err, Bill Gates - gets to it!

  • What would make the ultimate player... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Channard ( 693317 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @04:46AM (#6848764) Journal
    .. would be a feature that could play DVDs from any region on Windows regardless of how many changes the OS thinks you've got left. Currently, even if your DVD-Rom is region-free, Windows XP and 2000 are real swines when it comes to standing in the way of region-free playback.
  • moving towards Free software. I have Firebird and Thunderbird and a Free file player was next on my list. so horray. but where do I get it?

  • Surely (Score:3, Informative)

    by archonon ( 662612 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @04:46AM (#6848768)
    Mplayer rule them all? Yeah right, I guess Linux that zealots haven't ever heard Zoom Player. (It rules already)
    Zoom Player [inmatrix.com]

    • Re:Surely (Score:5, Informative)

      by Deusy ( 455433 ) <<charlie> <at> <vexi.org>> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @04:57AM (#6848805) Homepage
      I'll start by giving the direct link to Zoom Player [inmatrix.com].

      I'll follow up by shedding light on why we haven't heard about it:

      "Zoom Player Standard remains Free for Non-Commercial use, while Zoom Player Professional comes in a Fully Functional (uncrippled) trial version and requires registration ($19.95 U.S.)."

      Didn't you know? We're Free Software advocates, not free software advocates.

      • Re:Surely (Score:2, Interesting)

        by jgarland79 ( 665188 )
        Oh yea.. Zoom player. That wouldn't play my streaming mpeg video from ffserver either. Seems the only player that will is mplayer.
        • and afaik/everything/blablaa zoom player is just a regular player that doesn't decode anything itself(relies entirely on 3rd party codecs) even for dvd playback. bsplayer is a nice equivalent for something that just plays content through codecs on windows.

      • Re:Surely (Score:4, Informative)

        by jilles ( 20976 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @05:47AM (#6848940) Homepage
        There's plenty of oss players too. Bsplayer (bsplayer.org) and media player classic (http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/) come to mind. Both are excellent players and play anything you can throw at it (including DVDs if you have the right codecs installed). However, they use the ms media player codecs so they are not completely free. However, if you are on windows that is not necessarily a bad thing.
    • There is also VLC [videolan.org], which is open source and very complete.

    • Re:Surely (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ANTI ( 81267 ) *
      Sure.

      Zoom Player was the only useable player on windows.
      (I'm forced to use XP on our university machines.)

      I just grabbed mplayer 1.0pre1 and build it on one of these boxes.

      I have to say ... zoom player will be deleted from all boxes withing the next few days (if I find the time).
      I doesn't even stand a chance against mplayer...

      Why ?
      Resource usage. (Memory and CPU)
      # of supported codecs.
      Even plays broken files. (And I get a lot of those from my students.)

  • legal questions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mosu ( 639565 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @04:50AM (#6848776) Homepage
    mplayer will never be free of legal questions. Too many libs are bundled with it, and I for one am glad about it! Compiling multimedia applications can be a major pain in the youknowwhat with all those library dependencies. Mplayer bundles the more important libs (liba52, libavcodec aka ffmpeg, and now even faad2). This makes the build process far more reliable and definitely easier.

    But what would mplayer look like without all those libs? Well just take a look at the mplayer versions shipped with major distros. They're crippled, can't play most popular/modern files, and almost everyone has to download other uncrippled binaries or compile from source. I fully understand why no mplayer developer, me included, cares about legality.

    • Re:legal questions (Score:5, Informative)

      by Daengbo ( 523424 ) <daengbo AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @05:08AM (#6848833) Homepage Journal
      You should grab the package from LinuxTLE [opentle.org]. If you are on RH8.0, it should drop in without a problem. It's produced and distributed by the Thai gov't, and comes precompiled with everything they can put in there. Add this line to your apt repositories if you're using apt-rpm.
      rpm ftp://ftp2.nectec.or.th/pub/linux-distributions/Li nux_TLE/ andaman/i386/TLE main updates
      and install the following:
      • mplayer-common-0.90rc4-2_4tle
      • mplayer-skin-BlueHeart-1.4-2
      • mplayer-skin-Cyrus-1.0-2
      • mplayer-skin-hwswskin-1.0-2
      • mplayer-skin-neutron-1.4-2
      • mplayer-skin-slim-1.0-2
      • mplayer-skin-xine-lcd-1.0-2
      • mplayer-skin-avifile-1.5-2
      • mplayer-skin-CubicPlayer-1.0-2
      • mplayer-skin-gnome-1.1-2
      • mplayer-skin-netscape4-1.0-2
      • mplayer-skin-proton-1.1-2
      • mplayer-skin-xanim-1.5-2
      • mplayer-skin-AlienMind-1.0-2
      • mplayer-skin-CornerMP-aqua-1.0-2
      • mplayer-gui-0.90rc4-2_4tle
      • mplayer-skin-MidnightLove-1.5-2
      • mplayer-skin-plastic-1.1.1-2
      • mplayer-skin-WindowsMediaPlayer6-1.2-2
      • mplayer-0.90rc4-2_4tle
      • mplayer-skin-CornerMP-1.0-2
      • mplayer-skin-default-1.6-2
      • mplayer-skin-mentalic-1.1-2
      • mplayer-skin-phony-1.0-2
      • mplayer-skin-trium-1.0-2
      • mplayer-tools-0.90rc4-2_4tle
      You should then have my setup, which plays everything I have thrown at it.
      • You should grab the package from LinuxTLE. If you are on RH8.0, it should drop in without a problem.

        And for the many users of Mandrake, MPlayer with the proper codecs (and many other good programs) are available as rpms at PLF [zarb.org]

    • Re:legal questions (Score:4, Informative)

      by dabadab ( 126782 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @05:25AM (#6848879)
      Well, mplayer is mostly usable without any win32 lib and that means there are no copyright problems. All you really need is libavcodec: and there are no problems with that aside from the patents, and, as of this time, these are not enforcable in Europe and I hope that it stays so.
    • Compiling multimedia applications can be a major pain in the youknowwhat with all those library dependencies.

      # cd /usr/ports/multimedia/bloodyhugeapplication
      # make install clean

      What? Your OS can't do that for you? :-)

  • Link (Score:5, Informative)

    by WatertonMan ( 550706 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @04:51AM (#6848780)
    The article didn't give the link for downloading.

    Download MPlayer [mplayerhq.hu]

    Unfortunately I only saw the Linux player there and source. I believe the OSX binary is still the July version. So there may be a delay before it is available.

    OSX MPlayer [sourceforge.net]

    • Re:Link (Score:5, Informative)

      by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @05:37AM (#6848909) Journal
      win32 [mplayerhq.hu] has been here for months now in various states of workingness. It's unstable, but less so than the newest version of wmp. If your copy doesnt work, wait a few days and download a new one. The one I'm using has been working nicely for 3 or 4 months now.

      The best part is its just like the non-windows version -- it can still play quicktime/realplayer without loading their bloated apps. It also plays xvid/divx in high res cleanly which is needed for some game moveie, something WMP and Winamp both skip for 2 seconds every 10 just to resync.(note - I'm on an amd 1800+, 256mb ram, and a gf2mx400. not entirely the highest end system ever, but enough to decode simple video.)

  • But how does it stand up to the comeptition? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @04:53AM (#6848790)
    Xine? (Well in my opinion, xine is too buggy, crashes on most files and its gui sucks)
    Videolan? (I never tried it)
    Kmplayer? (The KDE port of mplayer, its got lovely kde goodness)
    Gstreamer? (Well gstreamer is just the library, but it has gst-player and totem as guis, but the library is still in beta, but stabler than Xine)
    Ogle?
    Xmovie?
    RealPlayer (linux version)?

    I don't have time to try it now, so id like some opinions.
    • Its the one. Try it and forget the rest.
    • I have tried Xine,Ogle,Videolan and Mplayer and found Ogle to be too primitive as yet. Xine has always worked extremely well for me (no instability) and is technically very proficient, plus it supports all the file formats I've ever needed it to. Videolan is pretty much equivalent to Xine but I don't like it's gui and it was annoying to have to build yet another gui toolkit (wxWindows) just for one app. Mplayer is in many ways technically superior to all the others and I would use it all the time except it

    • Re:But how does it stand up to the comeptition? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Xine? (Well in my opinion, xine is too buggy, crashes on most files and its gui sucks)

      Have you used Xine recently? It handles most, if not all of the files I've thrown at it. Now, i'll agree that the interface sucks, but one of the great features of xine (imho) is that the gui is de-coupled from the video decoding libraries. There are many other players that use xine-lib to decode the files, such as:

      Even more are listed on xi

      • One example I would not be proud of comparing to mplayer is OpiePlayer2. As the person who originally ported mplayer to the zaurus :) I have found that OpiePlayer2's (xine-based) playback is very choppy, and while the sound sounds good, trying to watch videos on it is mostly just a pain. Xmms-embedded, which uses mplayer to play video on the other hand is just great, very little skips if the file isn't messed up.

        I will give Xine points for getting a hell of a lot better, but frankly compared to mplayer it'

    • Re:But how does it stand up to the comeptition? (Score:4, Informative)

      by 13Echo ( 209846 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @08:37AM (#6849722) Homepage Journal
      I've found that MPlayer is more stable than XINE, and it plays video with a lot less CPU load. However, on one occasion, I had to use a XINElib based player (Totem) to play a really messed up WMV file that didn't seem to be properly encoded. Totem (XINElib) could play it, but MPlayer gave no video, even though they were using the same codecs from the same directory.

      MPlayer is my default player of choice, without the GUI (I prefer to use the arrowkeys for file navigation). It's associated in Nautilus to play all of my files. However, I keep Totem as my backup, though I've only had to use it once (in two years). I've found XINElib stuff to hard-lock my machine on multiple occasions, though in recent tests its been much more stable.

      One final thing about MPlayer. It, and its encoder, MEncoder, are great programs. You can have MPlayer send the output of an audi file to a raw PCM or WAV format, and convert it into OGG or MP3, so that you can play the files back in XMMS or something. I used it recently to convert some WMVs into OGG, for testing, and it sounded great. I couldn't notice any real difference between the files, and all of my Linux players could then handle the file.

  • Windows users: Media Player Classic (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zarhan ( 415465 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @04:53AM (#6848792)
    For Windows, I would suggest using Media Player Classic [google.com]. It's made to look like the good, light and fast Media Player 6.4 but it includes support for all the new codecs (including an automatic search from the web if you feed it a video with uninstalled codec) and has a ton of nice features. The updates come rather regularly.

    I don't know about this new mplayer on Windows, but the 0.9 at least was very slow on my computer. On FreeBSD it works fine.
    • Apart from a buggy internal mpeg1 decoder in the last build (6.4.6.0), it's been working perfectly. Just disable that though and it'll return to whatever codec you have installed. It plays anything I've been able to throw at it apart from one mysterious .wmv file it *should* have been able to play. Let the rest of the world skin their player, I'll take MPC and play the vid in full screen instead.

      Kjella

    • Re:Windows users: Media Player Classic (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @05:58AM (#6848973) Journal
      Yes, this is the best media player I've found for Windows so far. A key feature in my opinion is its built-in SVCD support. Also, the built-in subtitle support isn't too bad either. It has replaced the following media players for me:

      - PowerDVD (I don't need any real powerful features to watch SVCD's which I'm sure MPC might still lack)
      - Windows Media Player
      - QuickTime
      - RealPlayer

      All in a sub-Megabyte package.
    • By the way, this [sourceforge.net] link goes to its SourceForge page where you can find a download and other goodies like forums and the bug tracker. I guess it's the temporary home page while guliverki reconstructs the main page at gabest.org.
    • If you go to:

      http://www.freecodecs.com/

      you'll find a few programs called Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative. It has everything you need to replace your Real and Quicktime codecs plus it comes with a fairly recent version of Media Player Classic.

      I tried it out and found that it worked and seeked better than RealPlayer.

  • hungary really has some bright folks (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    if you consider, that hungary is a very little country, with as little as 10 million inhabitants. guess how many of em are technocrats and freaks.

    then remember that it used to be behind the iron curtain and under communistic influence.

    and still, hungary gave the world quite a lot of bright and intelligent people and famous folks who changed the world we live in today....

    • The people of Hungary are related to Finns. One piece of evidence is the similarities between our languages, which (together with Estonian) are very different from other European languages. And Finland only has some 5 million people, plus one penguin.
      • I'm sorry to inform you that the Penguin has left the country.

        On a more serious note, I was sure you were making up the Hungary/Finnish relationship, until I found this [finland.fi].
        • Nice link. Here's one with a bit more overview: The keyword here is 'finno-ugric [ethnologue.com]', which is the name of the language family to which Hungarian and Finnish (and a lot of other languages) belong.

          The parent of this thread was mistaken about the peoples since there is no evidence that the Hungarian and Finnish peoples are related, just the languages; in fact the modern day Hungarians do not seem to be descended from any one distinct ethnicity. I'm too lazy too find links, but I'm sure the more industrious an

  • Windows players... (Score:5, Informative)

    by xybe ( 525773 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @04:56AM (#6848803)

    If you want to see some windows-users' jaws drop, wait until one of them complains he cannot see some movie or the subtitles and show them one of the jukebox-on-a-CD linux distributions based on mplayer.

    They boot, they play. No installing, no fuzz.

    • The nice and minimal one: TheGeexBox [geexbox.org]
    • The big and powerful one: MoviX [sourceforge.net]
    • And a branch of the latter: WOMP [sourceforge.net]

    They can play anything mplayer 9x Can.

    • uhm ... what if you only have a single dvd-drive in your computer and nothing else? Can they run just fine without the "jukebox-cd" in the drive?

  • Other recent releases: Totem, GNOME 2 media player (Score:5, Informative)

    by Plug ( 14127 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @04:58AM (#6848808) Homepage
    You know the simultaneous best and worst thing about GNU/Linux/OSS etc is there is always another option...

    There was a new beta of Totem [hadess.net] released yesterday too - it's a GNOME 2 media player based on Xine (it doesn't attempt to reinvent the wheel). The author is also working on a Gstreamer [gstreamer.net] back end for it.

    Why do I like it? A quote on their webpage sums it up: "Totem is the only media player I've seen that doesn't attempt to have skins or look like a reject from a 1971 Kenwood catalog." For those of us who like Windows Media Player (pre 8) for its clean and consistent interface and were annoying that Linux doesn't have anything like it, Totem's your project.

    Mplayer does some files better than Totem, but if you want to do more than "mplayer This.divx", check it out.

    (standard "I have nothing to do with this project other than thinking it's really cool" disclaimer)

    Throwaway Question that will Undoubtedly Get Dozens of Answers while the Rest of the Post Goes Unread: Why doesn't Mplayer disable XScreensaver while playing?)

    • Re:Other recent releases: Totem, GNOME 2 media pla (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Crayon Kid ( 700279 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @05:33AM (#6848899)

      Mplayer does some files better than Totem, but if you want to do more than "mplayer This.divx", check it out.

      Ah, but you forget about MPlayer G2, which will be stripped of all front-end nonsense and instead implement all kinds of hooks that will allow people to built however vast frontends for it.

      Why doesn't Mplayer disable XScreensaver while playing?)

      For the same reason it doesn't disable, I don't know, PINE or Mozilla. XScreensaver is just an application that happens to be running at the same time, not a standard in power saving. MPlayer does, however, disable DPMS monitor power saving which is what you should be using if you really want power saving instead of fancy pictures showed when nobody's looking anyway.

    • "Totem is the only media player I've seen that doesn't attempt to have skins or look like a reject from a 1971 Kenwood catalog."

      That's the biggest appeal to the commandline players for me. I absolutely hate "skinned" apps. I don't use Windows styles or themes on my Windows machines, I don't even have wallpaper on any of my machines. So, when I see new media players that not only don't have standard interfaces, but don't even have standard *shapes*, there's no way I'm using them.

  • Oh the humanity... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by asb ( 1909 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @05:06AM (#6848828) Homepage

    How many hours did you waste while you wrote yet another skinned user interface? How many hours did you waste with Gimp while you made all those nifty default skins? How many hours of everyone elses time do you waste when people despreately install new skins in order to find the one that is even remotely usable?

    GUI widget sets are there to make it easy for programmers and designers to make user interfaces that are consistent and easy to learn. By implementing your very own eye candy skin framework you undermine all the hard work made by all those smart people.

    This is not a troll. Go read a book or two about user interface design.

    • Re:Oh the humanity... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by azzy ( 86427 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @05:35AM (#6848903) Journal
      I spent about 2-3 hours making a skin for mplayer that I find to be perfect for my needs. I wish I could use it for windows media player (when I'm on windows) but I can't. Thank god for mplayer skins! It lets me customise mplayer to be how /I/ want it. Isn't that the point?
      I don't know anyone else who uses or likes it,and frankly I'm not much bothered, but I did make it available here [freshmeat.net] as I thought sharing it was the least I could do.
    • How often have we chastized someone who wasted their time doing something they prolly aren't making money off of. Sure, they could be doing something "better" with your dime if you were paying them :)

    • Re:Oh the humanity... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Azghoul ( 25786 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @07:18AM (#6849182) Homepage
      "waste" is a pretty harsh way of looking at someone getting some practice using GIMP, isn't it? Call it, "practicing graphic arts skills" or something and it doesn't sound so bad.

      Maybe an interface for YOU doesn't make sense as an interface for ME. The nice thing about skins is YOU don't have to use MINE.

  • Windows already has an all in one media player (Score:5, Informative)

    by jkeyes ( 243984 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @05:10AM (#6848845) Journal
    It is called Media Player Classic. It's hosted on sourceforge and is open source! It also conviently doesn't include Quicktime or Real codec's but a quick search on google for Quicktime Alternative and Real Alternative gives you those codecs! It can play everything provided you have the proper codec installed including DVDs so everyone on windows enjoy. Appropriate links follow below:

    Media Player Classic [sourceforge.net]

    Real Alternative [betanews.com]

    Quicktime Alternative [betanews.com]

  • Any advance on VLC? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nicky_d ( 92174 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @05:15AM (#6848852) Homepage
    For OS X, I spent an age trying to get various codecs working in Quicktime to view variously encoded episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm which probably won't be aired in the UK before 2005. The recent Mac DivX codecs solved a lot of these, but I didn't like the fact that they came in an installer package - I try to stick to drag-installs on the Mac so I know what's where. Then I gave VLC (http://www.videolan.org/ [videolan.org]) a try, and in OS X at least, it works like a charm. I haven't found anything it won't run yet, it plays DVDs without any region checking (provided your firmware is fixed), and it handles VCDs to boot. It really does do everything I need it to in a proper one-app drag install, and it's GPL. Definitly worth a look for Apple users - which isn't to say Mplayer isn't worthy, too.

  • Mplayer in Windows (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Dr.Karnage ( 667962 )
    I've downloaded a couple of monts ago a windows binary of mplayer. It didn't played any divx I threw at it... It just kept "saying your machine is too slow to play this file". I agree with jkeyes and Zarhan: the best way to watch movies in Windows is through the mighty Media Payer Classic.

  • Legal issues (Score:5, Funny)

    by lina_inverse ( 699474 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @05:27AM (#6848884)
    In all fairness, calling it MPlayer probably wasn't the greatest idea. They might as well have called it "Real Quick MPlayer", just to annoy everyone else.
    • No, it's not a great name, but it's more generic than a rip-off. It just stands for "Movie Player." Xine is more original, but I'm never sure how to pronounce it (Zine?, X-I-N-E?).

  • Why so much attrition against Windoze users? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MBMarduk ( 607040 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @06:11AM (#6849000)
    I sense a LOT of 1337ist attitudes (grudges?) against the idea of using Mplayer on Win32.
    Why? What's with that?
    What ever happened to the ideal of free software for everyone INCLUDING convincing the unwashed Windoze masses of the superiority of FOSS?
    • Because if all the cool OSS stuff runs on Windows, there'll be nothing to convince people to use Linux. I'm all for a killer app that only runs on Linux, which drags people away from the anaethesitising soporific tedium that is Windows.

      • Re:Why so much attrition against Windoze users? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Eric Ass Raymond ( 662593 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @06:38AM (#6849058) Journal
        Because if all the cool OSS stuff runs on Windows, there'll be nothing to convince people to use Linux.

        Ah, so you want to force people into running Linux by depriving them of actually working open source software? What do you care what operating system people run? Mind your own business.

        And if you're so bent on having people move from Windows to Linux, why don't you concentrate on making Linux as easy to use and as comfortable as Windows is these days and the public adopt it - even without any dubious "in order to use our software, you'll have to use our operating system" bundling.

  • Great news (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gwala ( 309968 ) <.ten.alawg. .ta. .mada.> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @06:11AM (#6849002) Homepage
    The Mplayer software is absolutely brilliant, when running using the VESA driver (under bash), I managed to get my old Cel 500mhz laptop to play Dual-pass XVid at 30fps, without a problem. Plus the steady and all-in-one approach to drivers is a solution to the horrible driver mess that forms on any windows machine.

    -Gwala

    • Re:Great news (Score:2, Informative)

      by Dr.Karnage ( 667962 )
      Driver mess in Windows? Use ffdshow (http://ffdshow.sourceforge.net). Even if you want to use the latest DivX or XviD to watch your movies, you can tell ffdshow to let the codecs play them. In conjunction with Media Player Classic, it's perfect for any Windows machine.
  • The top headline of slashdot features a mighty new version of a popular Open Source project and I can still download it at 500 kB/s???

    HELLO!!! I thought this was slashdot!

    ...wait a sec, what am I complaining about?

  • mingw port rules! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Comsn ( 686413 )
    anyone that wants to see the greatness of mplayer on windows, check out http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32-bet a/ [mplayerhq.hu] and grab the mingw32-dev-CVS-... package. you can even add the realplayer and quicktime codecs from the download page and have real/quicktime working without having to install the horrible realplayer/quicktime players.
  • I don't know whether this was something intentional (i've been trying to find out) but somewhere in the last couple of minor releases I have no longer been able to play a group of files by doing 'mplayer *' on the command line. I have to make a playlist file and then play them.

  • Encoding (mencoder) (Score:2, Interesting)

    by dusty123 ( 538507 )
    While mplayer is an excellent piece of software for decoding video, mencoder (Encoding software) has a lot of bugs and limitations.

    Simple things, like concatenating 2 .mpg-Files fail, rebuilding indices also fail from time to time.

    Hopefully also the encoding part (also the documentation including examples) will improve.
    • Have you filed bug reports (on the index)? catting 2 mpegs is not supported officially, but it sometimes works, if and only if all the setttings are the same in both. (not to mention that atm I would not suggest using mplayers mpeg output container as opposed to avi output container (the default).)

      They can't fix what they can't see.

    • Re:Encoding (mencoder) (Score:4, Informative)

      by dnaumov ( 453672 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @09:02AM (#6849888)
      I've only recently (a few weeks ago) got into DVD-ripping under *NIX (using FreeBSD) and I found mencoder to be the most intuitive cli tool to use. Just thinking about trying to remember all cli switches to transcode makes my head hurt.

      Mencoder with libavcodec/ffmpeg provide good quality video encoding at decent speed. I am using the following -lavcopts to archieve the best results:

      "vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:v4mv:trell:precmp=258:cmp=258:su bcmp=258:vmax_b_frames=1"

      Make sure you pick a good video bitrate and rip the audio at good quality. Personally, I suggest 192 kbps CBR MP3 to prevent any kind of compatibility issues.

  • Xine (Score:3, Informative)

    by Hellboy0101 ( 680494 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @09:46AM (#6850200)
    Xine already does these things for Linux. Uninstall your old version of xine, then go to http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/ and get the latest build. Plays QT6 files, divx, WMP, DVDs, etc. Also works much better for Freevo if you're into that. RPMs only here (wish the source would be out to manually compile, but oh well). Works on RH9, Mandrake 9.1, and SuSe.

  • Interface... (Score:4, Informative)

    by singularity ( 2031 ) * <.nowalmart. .at. .gmail.com.> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @10:49AM (#6850700) Homepage Journal
    I would love to be able to use MPlayer on my OS X box. The interface, however, is one of the worst example of bad design I think I have ever seen. The program truly has to be seen on OS X to see how bad it is.

    Opening a movie opens the movie in another running program. The controls, on the other hand, are still in the original mplayer application.

    Menus are empty and unusable in the movie's application.

    There are other problems, these are just the major ones.

    Until Mplayer fixes some very serious UI issues in the OS X version, my money (figuratively) is with VLC. VLC also does one required thing - plays movies in full screen on one screen, while allowing me to work on another application on another screen. Mplayer takes over all monitors when in full-screen.

    In order to be accepted across the board, GPL software needs to remember UI. Maybe Mplayer is better on other platforms. It still has a long way to go under OS X.
    • Try using Mplayer from just the command line. It's a lot simpler that way and you never have to mess with the mouse. It sounds annoying, but it's actually much better than the traditional menu/button setup. Having switched from linux to macos x (sweet, sweet powerbooks), not being able to run movies off the command-line (and not being able to watch half my movies) has been one of my big complaints.

  • MPlayer first impression / review (Score:3, Informative)

    by Experiment 626 ( 698257 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:07AM (#6850866)
    I had never used MPlayer before, but got bored over the weekend and decided to check it out. Since we have an MPlayer topic, I'll provide a little review for others thinking of doing the same.

    I did the install from the RPM's on the MPlayer site instead of doing my own build, they have lots of dependencies, some apparently circular, so installing everything from one rpm command seems to work best. The one library that I didn't already have on my system and wasn't in the RPM's was libfaad, which I quickly found with a little Googling.

    The only other setup I had to do to get MPlayer working was that it expects the DVD drive to be /dev/dvd by default, so I made a symlink for that. MPlayer also lets you set the DVD drive via the settings menu or a command line switch, so this is not a big deal

    The DVD I watched was Disney's "Beauty and the Beast". Yes, I know, evil company. Playing title 1, chapter 1 only showed a Walt Disney logo then playback stopped. I tried various other titles until finally discovering Title 17 was the movie itself. I didn't figure out how to bring up the main DVD menu, which would have hopefully made figuring out where on the disc the movie was trivial.

    Playback was initially jerky and poor. Toggling a couple of the playback / frame dropping options fixed this and playback became flawless on my system.

    I did experience some cryptic error messages and a couple crashes (application crashes, not lockups) so I would characterize MPlayer as very usable but not completely stable.

    As far as user interface, it was good, and similar in layout to Windows Media Player and such. My main complain about the GUI was that many of the buttons are labelled only with a symbol, and hovering the mouse pointer over them did not bring up any kind of help bubble to explain them, so using the GUI involved more trial and error than it should have.

    The other feature I tried out was MP3 playback. It sounded good, but when I associated MP3's in Nautilis with MPlayer and clicked on a second MP3 while the first was playing, it didn't switch songs or enqueue, but rather started up a second instance of MPlayer playing a different song at the same time, which sounded terrible. I'm sure there's a way to fix this (if nothing else, a shell script wrapper would work), but compared to WinAmp doing things right from the start, it still came as a disappointment.

    I haven't tried the other features out (skins, encoding, etc.) but all in all, I was impressed with what I have seen so far. For people looking to play DVD's and other types of media under Linux, MPlayer is well worth downloading.

    • For people looking to play DVD's and other types of media under Linux, MPlayer is well worth downloading.

      It also works flawlessly under FreeBSD. I finally figured out the problem with Quicktime playback, and now I have one less reason to boot into Windows. With kmplayer, it's also a native plugin to Konqueror.

      The FreeBSD guys are going to be showing it off at TechTV today.

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