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This means that it can now be integrated in all distributions without packagers worrying of legal problems (which obviously includes Debian). A side effect (and equally important, in my opinion) is that this move makes this player available to a larger audience (exposing its remaining bugs and lack of portability to more people) and, of course, benefiting a larger part of the people that install Linux.

So, please, if you can download it, compile it and report bugs that you find (including people using different architectures). This way, we can all have a first-class, flexible, free movie player for many Operating Systems.

And contrary to popular belief, if you make a good bugreport, the mplayer team is very friendly fixing the bugs you find.

Of course, nobody would see a Doctor saying only "Hey, Doc, I am sick." and expecting a complete diagnostic. The same applies, evidently, to software development.

... about "burn the GPL" posted on the MPlayer website previously?

I see they've changed the layout of their site now, but previously there was an anti-GPL logo with a spiel about why the developers hated it so much.

I guess a change of heart, or perhaps a change of developers? :)

In either case: good on you MPlayer developers, for a truly excellent piece of software.

Mencoder is easier, transcode is more versatile (I think).

Mencoder is the "encoding" project that goes along with Mplayer, which in my opinion is probably the best-performing media player with the widest support for files and codecs (including Windows Media codecs, using the 'native' Windows DLL's) for linux at the moment, though not necessarily the easiest to use (not difficult, in my opinion, either, just not "clicky-pointy" simple like, say, Xine).

Trans code, on the other hand, has a bewildering variety of options to work through, but has a ton of functionality to go with it.

In both cases, the software handles reading DVD's, and can convert them to other formats. Transcode handles a bunch of different formats and codecs. Mencoder is limited to .avi file format at the moment, but can put a variety of codecs into this avi (including vorbis audio, as I recall). I've also found that you can even use mencoder to "capture" mms:// files for offline perusing or conversion, which is nice, since otherwise I wouldn't get anything but the Microsoft "Download Media Player for Mac or Windows" page whenever I tried to view such things...

For MPlayer/Mencoder, I strongly recommend reading the documentation (the software is great, but the impatience of the people on the mplayer mailing lists with people asking questions that are answered in the documentation are well known) and using a recent set of CVS sources.

Mplayer which is an excellent Linux media player (including dvd support) also comes with an encoder called mencoder which can output Divx;) avi files from your dvds, supports 2 pass encoding and subtitles, and other fun stuff like that. It works (well) for me. Mplayer is a great player in my opinion and it supports almost every file format i've encountered excluding sorenson quicktime.

Get mplayer.

Say what? Or were you talking about this?

(When over-abbreviating things, be careful you don't change the meaning of what you were trying to say.)

Try Mplayer. It plays ASF.

You might want to check out MPlayer, it has support for TV-out on the Matrox cards and also acceleration for them too..

Without taking any part in the debate of browser integration, I feel that it is an absolute necessity to speak out the facts about the Windows Media Player.

Basically, Media Player will play back any audio / video format for which a DirectShow filter is available. The API is completely published; anybody can go out and write their own DirectShow filter for any new audio / video format that (s)he might develop. It is also completely open in the other direction; anybody can go out and write their own media player that can take the full advantage of all the DirectShow filters installed on the system. Good examples are Zoom Player (good for crappy TV-out chips like in some Geforce2 MX cards), TMPGEnc (can read in any video format that is supported and write out MPEG-1 or 2) and AVISynth (virtualizes any DirectShow-supported video format into .avi that all video editing programs understand).

Additionally, Media Player 6.4 is the absolutely best media player program that there can be. It's light weight, fast, simple, easy to use and doesn't have any advertisements. It can also retrieve newly supported codecs automatically from a server in the Internet, although this feature hasn't been used much. Compared to RealPlayer and Quicktime Player, the superiority is obvious.

It looks more like Apple and Real are pissed off because they would lose precious advertising and branding revenues if any media player program could play back their files. As previously noted, *anybody* can write their own DirectShow filter so Apple and Real definitely have the technical abilities to make those, but don't want to do so. Of course, it would mean that anybody could use the DirectShow filters to re-encode the content from their proprietary formats to some open format like MPEG-1 or 2, and reduce Real's and Apple's exclusivity value. It would also mean that people wouldn't be limited to their crappy, ad- and spyware-ridden media player programs.

Incidentally, DivX was supported in Linux originally thanks to the DirectShow filters being available. It was relatively easy to hook them up to a media player in a completely different OS, even if the source code wasn't available. Not very surprisingly, neither the Realvideo/audio codecs nor the most common Quicktime codecs are supported in for example mplayer.

In other words, would you REALLY want to see the standard Media Player removed from Windows and have it replaced with RealPlayer and Quicktime Player that don't play half of the formats that Media Player does, and are slow, sluggish, difficult to use and filled with advertisements and spyware, and are basically dead-ends when it comes to video formats and video processing? I wouldn't.

Without taking any part in the debate of browser integration, I feel that it is an absolute necessity to speak out the facts about the Windows Media Player.

Basically, Media Player will play back any audio / video format for which a DirectShow filter is available. The API is completely published; anybody can go out and write their own DirectShow filter for any new audio / video format that (s)he might develop. It is also completely open in the other direction; anybody can go out and write their own media player that can take the full advantage of all the DirectShow filters installed on the system. Good examples are Zoom Player (good for crappy TV-out chips like in some Geforce2 MX cards), TMPGEnc (can read in any video format that is supported and write out MPEG-1 or 2) and AVISynth (virtualizes any DirectShow-supported video format into .avi that all video editing programs understand).

Additionally, Media Player 6.4 is the absolutely best media player program that there can be. It's light weight, fast, simple, easy to use and doesn't have any advertisements. It can also retrieve newly supported codecs automatically from a server in the Internet, although this feature hasn't been used much. Compared to RealPlayer and Quicktime Player, the superiority is obvious.

It looks more like Apple and Real are pissed off because they would lose precious advertising and branding revenues if any media player program could play back their files. As previously noted, *anybody* can write their own DirectShow filter so Apple and Real definitely have the technical abilities to make those, but don't want to do so. Of course, it would mean that anybody could use the DirectShow filters to re-encode the content from their proprietary formats to some open format like MPEG-1 or 2, and reduce Real's and Apple's exclusivity value. It would also mean that people wouldn't be limited to their crappy, ad- and spyware-ridden media player programs.

Incidentally, DivX was supported in Linux originally thanks to the DirectShow filters being available. It was relatively easy to hook them up to a media player in a completely different OS, even if the source code wasn't available. Not very surprisingly, neither the Realvideo/audio codecs nor the most common Quicktime codecs are supported in for example mplayer.

In other words, would you REALLY want to see the standard Media Player removed from Windows and have it replaced with RealPlayer and Quicktime Player that don't play half of the formats that Media Player does, and are slow, sluggish, difficult to use and filled with advertisements and spyware, and are basically dead-ends when it comes to video formats and video processing? I wouldn't.

at least 2 products seem to object strongly to the 2.96 gcc (I remember reiserfs having a fit about 2.96; and I forget the other thing that didn't like 2.96, sorry)..

Maybe that would be Mplayer. See here and here. From these links you'd think there's a little friction between the Mplayer guys and the Red Hat crew. Can't we all get along? :)

at least 2 products seem to object strongly to the 2.96 gcc (I remember reiserfs having a fit about 2.96; and I forget the other thing that didn't like 2.96, sorry)..

Maybe that would be Mplayer. See here and here. From these links you'd think there's a little friction between the Mplayer guys and the Red Hat crew. Can't we all get along? :)

You call it Mplayer

Mplayer plays any video WMP can play, and plays it with its own interface directly to the WMP codecs, and does it for free. The downside is they only allow source distribution, because it sorta auto-configures in a massive way during the build. The player is open source, the codecs are not.

Works really really well.

and BTW, why should I buy some shite that supports ms mplayer when I have mplayer ???

How shit. This is not informative (mod up and I'll kick your tiny gay ass), I once fucked a moderator mother and sicne then they all think "I am their father" (caverneous voice à la Dark-Fathor)

As long as you're talking about WMV 7 (not sure about WMV 8, though it may well be supported), and you're not planning to stream, the avifile Win32 codec hacks and MPlayer (I use the latest CVS) seem to work fine. Just make sure to install the codecs before you compile MPlayer and specify --with-win32libdir= as an option to configure. You can also get support for stuff like DivX 5, too. :) Hope this helps.

Try MPlayer.

MPlayer plays this file just fine under Linux.

Life is made more difficult because there is buggy and/or broken hardware out there. I don't blame Redhat for accomodating this hardware, but by doing so they are making their distribution more complicated and less useful for those "in the know".

Redhat also, of course, distributes the non-kernel binaries optimized for Intel 80386 CPU's when the vast vast majority of installs are going on Pentium-class or better machines. And it doesn't help any that Redhat is using and distributing a very nonstandard version of GCC; see what the GCC developers say about such branches and what application developers say about this branch.

To actually learn a lot about Linux and all the associated tools that make it work, I highly recommend the Linux From Scratch method: build everything from source! You can optimize the build to your machine and end up with not only better performance, but a vastly superior knowledge of everything that used to be "under the hood".

I've seen this before. mplayer is awesome! I've never seen a movie via ascii art before! Just wish I could get it to work... I'm so lazy.

Hmm, kinda. The parts are there, but no-one has put them together in a neat package yet. That's probably since Linux video software has really taken off in just the last 6 months.

There's mplayer which is a great player for any video-format out there. It can even play DVD's, although it doesn't have menu support like Ogle. It can also rip DVD:s to MPEG-4 (a.k.a DivX) using a couple of different encoders. Xvid is my favorite open-source MPEG-4 encoder, it's also got good reviews on Doom9 (good place for DivX info!).

For the TV-in recording part you can use a $50 WinTV card and the Video4Linux drivers. On top of that you need an audio-video capture application that can use encoders such as Xvid and Lame to encode to MPEG-4 (video) and MP3 (audio). I use NVrec. If you try the NVrec suite, use the DIVX4rec app (with the Xvid library instead of divx4linux which isn't maintained anymore). On my P-III 500MHz I can compress 29.97 Hz (NTSC) 320x240 in real-time to 800 kbit/s (video) + 80 kbit/s (audio). It takes about 5 hours to make a one-pass encoding of a DVD, so with a faster CPU it's probably possible to do real-time de-interlacing and encoding of 640x480 video.

A drawback is that NVrec is a command-line app for recording, I'm working on a patch for real-time preview on Matrox G400 TV-out. Or if you have a fast enough computer you might be able to run mplayer on the file as it is being recorded. This would allow for Tivo-like pause and resume. It might be a problem with AVI files from NVrec though since I don't think they're streamable.

Now, to put all of this together you need some kind of control application. That's not really that hard to write compared to all the other pieces (mplayer, xvid, nvrec). I've been working on one for the last couple of months, and have an alpha version that is usuable. It only supports the Matrox G400 for TV-out, and is a little crude, but it works good enough that I have it hooked up to my TV for everyday use. It's controllable by a remote control (see Lirc), using a very simple text-menu system to view tv, play avi/mpeg/mp3/dvd, record tv-in and rip DVD's. I'm getting ready to put it up on Sourceforge as Freevo within the next couple of weeks.

The application is written in Python which is great for stuff like this. Once the basic stuff is done, it might be cool to make a plugin architecture where you could interface to other stuff. For instance, with OSD (on screen display), it is easy to add things like new mail notification while you're watching TV. Or new Slashdot headlines, ICQ chat notif, phone caller ID interface, www control, etc. And, of course, an interface to some kind of tv-guide.

I haven't really found any other complete applications like this. Not that I've looked that hard, I'm always looking for an excuse to write software. mplayer might end up with all these feaures eventually, it is improving at an incredible rate at the moment.

I'm trying to find ways to stream video, without relying on the wine library. I am looking for video players that run on linux, ideally embedded linux with framebuffer (without XFree86).

XINE: I saw that Xine should do that, but when I run it, the open menu cannot open anything besides local files. here is the link for Xine's MMS plugin: MajorMMS

OGG TARKIN is not even started yet.
3iVX: anyone using their protocol/codec?
AVIFILE and MPLAYER - do you know if they can play back video streams aside from crazy ideas such as this asfrecorder-mplayer hack?
And any users of linux4TV codecs?
Thanks for any help - gigi

I'm trying to find ways to stream video, without relying on the wine library. I am looking for video players that run on linux, ideally embedded linux with framebuffer (without XFree86).

XINE: I saw that Xine should do that, but when I run it, the open menu cannot open anything besides local files. here is the link for Xine's MMS plugin: MajorMMS

OGG TARKIN is not even started yet.
3iVX: anyone using their protocol/codec?
AVIFILE and MPLAYER - do you know if they can play back video streams aside from crazy ideas such as this asfrecorder-mplayer hack?
And any users of linux4TV codecs?
Thanks for any help - gigi

A year ago this would have been GREAT if not WONDERFUL news. Now that we have mplayer, it's just great. TIMTOWTDI.

Calling .asf a "Windows-only media format" is either naively ill-informed or a deliberate lie.

Same experience here. MPlayer is by far the best player I know, no matter the platform. Apreche, I'd seriously advise giving it a try -- it works great and it's very well documented. I've never had a problem with it, and I even think it's one of the most underrated open source programs. And if for whatever reason you can't seem to make it compile right, toss an email my way (balin[]rne.eu.org with [ares@ie] in gap) and I'll see if I can help. :)

WMV, otoh, apart from already having worked in Linux via mplayer for many moons, possesses quite possibly a majority of the web browsing video market. Should it not, then I would assume that it's second only to RealMedia.

Please purchase yourself a clue. Thank you. :)

Funny.
I also reboot my computer to watch movies, but in the opposite direction.
On my computer, the only things I do is to play games (mainly quake3 and total annihilation) and watch movies and music.
I usally run windows, but when I want to watch a movie, I just can't face the crappy windows media player. (Yes, I tried others. bsplayer, microdvd, etc. no one satisfied me.)
Then I boot linux to watch it on MPlayer, by far the best player i have seen.
By the way, MPlayer is only avaiable as source code, but I never had any problem compiling it.

A nice alternative to using Windows Media Player under linux for viewing movies (even windows media formats!) is "MPlayer", located at: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/. It's a bit tricky for a novice to install, but the effort is well worth it.

Supported formats current include "MPEG, VOB, AVI, VIVO, ASF/WMV, QT/MOV, FLI, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, and some RealMedia files", as well as "MPEG, VOB, AVI, VIVO, ASF/WMV, QT/MOV, FLI, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, and some RealMedia files", to quote from the information on mplayer's site.

Mplayer already does pretty much everything Windows Media Player can do, and it's native to Linux. The Quicktime support mentioned in the writeup is a red herring, Windows Media Player (IIRC) still does not support Sorenson Quicktimes, making it no better than xanim at playing modern .mov files.

which supports Win32 Codecs including Quicktime MOV, etc. see Here.

Woah, Windows Media player, not MPlayer

Remember that even 1/100 of cent per codec makes it impossible to implement as free software. If you write a free software encoder and ten milions of people will start using it, will you just pay $2.5M to MPEG-4 guys, begging people to stop using it in more copies?

If free like free beer, you're right.
If free like free speech, you're not.

If the program is gratis (like free beer) but it's not a free software, it can be possible to control how many people are using it, so you can control how much money you have to pay to MPEG people. But if it's a free software, you can't control how many people are using it.

So I suppose, you wanted to say:

If free like free speech, you're right.
If free like free beer, you're not.

It's called Prime Time. It's what advertisers pay them bigtime for, and when all the most popular shows get scheduled. After all, this is the time the largest target audience is going to be watching.

Now, VCRs aren't such a big deal, because they're clunky and inconvenient. Programming them is a pain. Manually recording defeats most of the point, since you still have to be there.

Throw into the mix PVRs, though, and Prime Time becomes any time. If everyone has a PVR (and they could eventually... they're cheap, and so convenient), there's no reason to schedule a show during any particular hour, since that's probably not when it'll get watched. There will be no time-based competition. Advertisers won't see the point in paying extra for any particular timeslot. By controlling the horizontal and vertical, they're getting more money, and now they see PVRs taking that away.

So everyone go get/build a PVR if you want to stick it to them.

On a somewhat on-topic note, it's really easy to build one of these things, too. The software is already there in parts, it just needs a little glue. Check out mp1e for encoding, or anything else you like such as low-bitrate DivX. Combine this with mplayer or something and a little at, cron, or various web-based TV recording stuff on freshmeat and there you've got it. I already do this all manually and it works better than TV (skipping ads is really worth it, not to mention not missing shows), and I'm planning on putting together a box with 3-4 TV cards to do this in a dedicated manner. Go PVRs.

1. In early stages, everyone wants to start his own project. Nobody wants to be a small piece of a larger project. I have tried to corral people working on similar things as me into one project, but no one is willing to give up their ideas and control in order to be a third-tier contributor to a larger project.
2. People will generally not contribute at all unless the current product is usable, and sufficently compelling to make them want to improve it. A half-baked idea or a half-finished client will stagnate indefinitely. One only needs look on sourceforge for the 80% of unfinished projects there. You know, the ones with no code, or a little code but not yet working.
3. If other people do contribute, they're not going to implement your ideas. They will implement their ideas. Almost nobody joins a project, and picks something randomly from the TODO list. In my personal pet project, I don't think anyone has ever written something that I put on my TODO list. Though I have received several contributions that I didn't think of.

So I say this to all open source developers: Look for and join another project, rather than starting your own! Open Source would go a lot farter, a lot faster, if so much effort wasn't wasted on projects that eventually dead-end. Imagine the effort that went into each of those projects went instead into larger a larger project!

On the other hand, writing a generic library is often exactly what is needed. In your case, a generic server and client library might be a good idea, but it must be sufficently generic and you'll have to give up on the idea of people implementing your kind of client. You might be surprised what it gets used for. (Software is funny that way) For instance, gstreamer seems to have given up on writing the be-all and end-all media player (a la mplayer), in favor of writing a component library for media playing. It remains to be seen whether they will be successful, but I think they will be. This route is difficult, and requires a lot of evangelism. Not everyone will agree with your design decisions, so not everyone will want to use it.

-- Bob

MPlayer

"...anything multimedia works poorly if at all."

I definitely have to disagree to this broad statement. Recently I've found myself rebooting into Linux just to play movies. Mplayer is the video player I've used any operating system.

I didn't write any codecs, just some players. I spent a lot of time finding the best way to parse bad 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, and you can rebuild their indexes with the -idx option, thus enabling seeking! As you see, stability and quality are the most important things for me, but the speed is also amazing.

However, if you point your browser here , here, or here you can download the various different quality full length trailers, which will play fine with the latest version of mplayer.

And, damn, that dub is terrible...

I'm getting fullscreen (800x600) DivX playback on a K6-3+, 400 MHz machine. In fact this is a recent achievement, because only with X 4.2.0 I have XVideo and DGA available. Without those, the VESA driver is probably the fastest.

Hmm.. this is probably the nth question about DivX playing.. time for a FAQ perhaps? :-)

I use mplayer.

There's countless others, but I don't feel like looking for them.

I remember back when binary packages weren't released for damn near anything - after all, with gcc, everyone could have a C compiler. Wanted to run the newest afterstep or fvwm? Guess what? Download the source.

For linux, it's the distribution's job to provide binaries. For other systems like solaris and HP-UX there are places like Sun Freeware or HP-UX Software Porting Archive to get it. Some projects do so as a courtesy, but it's hardly required.

For something like XFree86, a binary distribution would almost certainly screw up your linux distribution's packaging system. Very few people would be able to utilize a binary distro of X that isn't tailored for their flavor of linux.

Besides, if you run something like linux from scratch then you don't want to download binaries anyway.

----rhad

Why not? You can watch TV in text mode, you can play DVDs in text mode,
you can play Quake 1 in text mode. Quake II is the logical next step.

Or, as the author of ttyquake put it, "If you have to ask why, you're not a member of the intended audience."

There are a few reasons behind that. Firstly, MPlayer has many options with regard to what kind of output it should use. These are bese selected during compilation.

GFair enough, but that's an architecture problem that the team should hopefully fix soon.

Secondly, to be really useful, MPlayer requires several dlls, and codecs. These codecs either come from the windows dlls, or from closed source projects like the DivX(tm) MPEG-4 Codec.

So? Many (read most) Linux players do this: Avifile, Xine, etc. They can still be packaged - stick freshrpms.net in your sources.list on your redhat box and APT away. They just separate the DLLs from the software if necessary.

Unlike the Open Source players, though, Mplayer uses non Open Source code in its actual binaries apparently. So yeah, ignore the web page claiming its open source and read this Mplayer therefore does not meet the Open Source Definition or the Free Software Freedoms list and shouldn't bother claiming to be Open Source.

Those win32 files can also be found on their dowload page here.

Download, extract and put them in /usr/lib/win32/ (or someplace else if you specify during ./configure)

Good lord. Did you even look at the, IMHO, clearly labeled "DOCS" directory? Well since everyone seems to need their hand held to read the FAQ page for this project here you go:

all DOCS

supported codecs

FAQ

If you can't find you answer there, then it could be a bug. So follow all the steps in this docutment to the mplayer-users mailing list....

bug report

By the way, all of those files were downloaded when you acquired mplayer by CVS or the source.tar.gz.

Good lord. Did you even look at the, IMHO, clearly labeled "DOCS" directory? Well since everyone seems to need their hand held to read the FAQ page for this project here you go:

all DOCS

supported codecs

FAQ

If you can't find you answer there, then it could be a bug. So follow all the steps in this docutment to the mplayer-users mailing list....

bug report

By the way, all of those files were downloaded when you acquired mplayer by CVS or the source.tar.gz.

Good lord. Did you even look at the, IMHO, clearly labeled "DOCS" directory? Well since everyone seems to need their hand held to read the FAQ page for this project here you go:

all DOCS

supported codecs

FAQ

If you can't find you answer there, then it could be a bug. So follow all the steps in this docutment to the mplayer-users mailing list....

bug report

By the way, all of those files were downloaded when you acquired mplayer by CVS or the source.tar.gz.

Good lord. Did you even look at the, IMHO, clearly labeled "DOCS" directory? Well since everyone seems to need their hand held to read the FAQ page for this project here you go:

all DOCS

supported codecs

FAQ

If you can't find you answer there, then it could be a bug. So follow all the steps in this docutment to the mplayer-users mailing list....

bug report

By the way, all of those files were downloaded when you acquired mplayer by CVS or the source.tar.gz.

(...raises hand)

Well the "Dillo" webbrowser launches faster than a gassy turd pulled by gravity! It launches fast! It's the best X11/GTK+ Webbrowser for slow computers! It can't download other files intelligently yet, but I gave the author a hint to use a way of downloading files like the Ximian GNOME's native webbrowser, with an external program called "gtransfter" or "gtop"... I can't remember the name. So, that if for some reason the browser were to crash, the files being downloaded would not be stopped. So far, Netscape and Microsoft Internet Expl(or|oit)er will take file downloads with them as they crash. I remember I once tried downloading the LinuxQuake3 demo from ftp.cdrom.com about 7 months ago and Netscape crashed in the middle of the download! AIEEEEEEEEE! It was a big loss, so I did it again, taking about 90 minutes to download, and I got it perfectly and the next webpage I visited caused Netscape to crash. Lucky I got it in time, I guess...

And his criticisms of lack of documentation seem to me to be unjustified. There's an excellent comprehensive manual which is available in four different languages and covers virtually every aspect of the system.

MPlayer is a remarkable package, all kudos to its developers who deserve a great deal of credit for what they've achieved so far.