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Also check out the news page over at the mplayer homepage. The latest release, 0.60pre1, is supposed to play mov format. A snip from the changes:

...
support for new fileformats (Quicktime MOV, VIVO v1/v2 and Autodesk FLI/FLC)
...

I haven't tested mov yet, but mplayer is great for avi, divx etc.

MPlayer makes use of MMX and 3Dnow! if they are available. Makes my K6-III+, 400 MHz, play DivX quite well :-)

mplayer, a movie player, does. (I'm not sure about SSE, but definitely MMX and 3DNow!) In fact, the author discourages people from distributing binaries, so that you are forced to get good performance.

mplayer, a movie player, does. (I'm not sure about SSE, but definitely MMX and 3DNow!) In fact, the author discourages people from distributing binaries, so that you are forced to get good performance.

it's that we need to NOT need it. What I mean is that the only movies I can't play right now are the ones with Sorensen and other proprietary codecs. Were Apple and folks to stop using these, I would be able to play pretty much anything.

I use MPlayer. It supports every codec (save Sorensen et al) that I've run across. It has a gui now, or it runs from the command line (for all the people who want to script their multiple-file porn). Furthermore, it's actually better than WMP for several reasons, my favorite being that WMP requires you to have an entire AVI file on disk before it will play it, whereas with MPlayer you can start watching while you are still downloading it.

If this doesn't seem important to you, consider downloading a 200MB file only to discover its crappy quality. With MPlayer, you can check it as soon as you've downloaded enough bytes to play a few frames, thus saving tons of bandwidth, not to mention disk space or time spent unraring things.

I use MPlayer only, but I have seen other OSS players and they are just as good. Lastly I will mention that the day I got MPlayer up and running was the same day that I killed my last Win* partition. I haven't rebooted since :)

For those of you who know the difference between QT and Quicktime, take heed! There is hope! I've successfully played some Quicktime movies using WINE. Everybody knows the Crossover plugin from CodeWeavers. I've also had some very good results with the CodeWeavers version of Wine.

Unfortunately some aspects of the UI don't work but the movies play nicely. I can't wait until TransGaming's WineX or stock Wine runs Quicktime movies as good as mplayer plays .avi files under my favourite OS!

Does anyone know exactly how crosspollination between these projects work? I would say that besides GNU and Linux, Wine has the potential to be the most useful piece of code ever created.

1) Gaming compatibility. There simply is no alternative to using a Microsoft OS if you want to be able to play the vast majority of games that have been made for the PC in the last 20 years. Sure, you can run *most* DOS games in DR-DOS--but not all of them, and at any rate you'd still have to boot a Windows variant to play all the Windows games. Some Windows games will work under WINE, but the vast majority will not. Hence, as someone with a very huge collection of games spanning 20 years, many of which I actually like to play rather than just have sit there, I need to use a Microsoft OS. Linux will never cut it in that department unless the Win9x codebase is opened, which is of course very unlikely.

In my home net I have a linux PC and a WinXP machine. I have recently bought several games from Loki, and guess what- now my Linux PC is used mostly for games. Much more than the XP PC which only runs a few older (for us) games that we already completed

Many game vendors are starting to realize the advantages of Linux for gaming and release their games for Linux as well as Windows. By buying games for Linux, you support the Linux world and fight Microsoft. By pirating Microsoft Windows but paying for Windows software you signal to the companies that they should release their software only for Windows, thus supporting Microsoft.

2) Application compatibility and continuity. Because Windows has been the dominant platform for many years, people like me are used to using certain applications for certain jobs--they work well for us and we aren't interested in changing to a new OS and trying to find an equivalent which probably is not there in the same fashion. This is especially true since so many Linux apps are enigmatically named (how are we supposed to find them in the first place?) and not geared for GUI users. Most end users like me have no desire to leave a well-mapped-out GUI app with buttons and menus in intuitive places and universal shortcuts (most Windows apps or Mac apps conform to the same shortcut key layouts--Linux apps often do not) for a Linux app that isn't very intuitively layed out because it either caters mostly to CLI users or was coded by CLI users who didn't really put thought into layout for GUI folk.

Productivity studies have shown that a well-traided CLI user is much more productive than the respective well-trained GUI user. This is simply because it's faster for the brain to type a command than to precisely point and click several menus with the mouse. You aren't typing with your mouse, are you?

With that said, Linux does have intuitive GUIs and even lets you simulate Windows for various tasks. Learning the names of apps is quite trivial and can be done in a few minutes, and it's always good to learn your tools throughly before using them. You have been using an OS for begginers. It is time to evolve to a more advanced OS, to a system that does what you want it do, and not what it wants.

Anyone knows instantly what Media Player does--it plays media, like movies and sounds. Great. But how is an end user supposed to know what xanim does?

Have you tried Mplayer? Better name for you? It's also a much better app for media playing.

My time is too valuable to waste learning.

But your time is so unvaluable to waste on using your tools sub-optimally. Think on how much time you waste by not knowing keyboard shortcuts, or by rebooting your system and restoring data after a crash, or by reading /. for that matter :)

I need ACDSee for viewing pictures, and I won't even touch that crap that comes built-in to WinXP for doing so.

Have you ever tried GQview? It works real well.

I need Photoshop for image editing--The Gimp is okay, and I can do some script-fu with it that I can't under Photoshop, but it isn't as powerful in most respects, is more clunky and difficult to use, and lacks CMYK color separation which is a must for many graphic artists

Hmmm.... Image|Mode|Decompose...|CMYK. Was that so hard?

3) Compatibility with the outside world. This isn't important to everyone. Indeed, even Mac users get used to a certain amount of non-interoperability. But to some of us it's damn important. I'm not talking about just the whole Office .doc thing, either--an awful lot of media is Windows-only, for example. There are codecs which will never be available on Linux, but I have no problem finding them for Windows. Why should I put up with not being able to use a film clip, when I could have done so with Windows?

If you are talking about "Windows Media Player", then just use Mplayer, which supports almost all Media Player codecs. If you are talking about Quicktime, why should you use a non-portable codec? If you are referring to RealPlayer, there is a linux version available.

Again, not everyone cares, but some of us do. There are some pretty strange and obscure file formats that have been developed over the years, but almost alays there is software for Windows which will handle it. The same just can't be said for Linux, or to a large extent for Mac. That's not to say closed and hard-to-deal-with formats are good--I always try to use open and readily-available formats that anyone can use or view. But there are a lot of people out there who don't do the same and there are also a lot of legacy files to be dealt with.

Actually, quite a lot of 'obscure' formats are supported in the standard apps available on Linux, such as ImageMagick. Which obscure formats have you had problems with?

B) Chasing Amy uses (pirated) Windows. Microsoft gets no money from him. Whatever he produces and sends over the net is cross-platform.

But now - Chasing Amy pays for Windows software, which triggers more windows software to be produced, thus making it even harded for people such as Chasing Amy to switch to Linux, and increasing Micro$oft's monopoly. In addition, Chasing Amy finds a job somewhere, and his employer is required to purchase a M$ license for him, thus giving money directly to Microsoft. It's all about market share. By using windows you increase the amount of licenses that will be sold, either by not influencing people not to buy windows, or by using purchased versions of Windows in public places and at work, or even by purchasing Windows software and games instead of Linux software and games, thus dragging Loki to bankrupcy and making game developers think developing for Linux is a bad idea.

In either case, the results are the same. Whether I use Linux or not has no bearing at all on anything external to my box. Internally it makes sure that I can use media and documents I wouldn't be able to use with Linux, and it maintains my use of the apps I am familiar with. Externally the world doesn't know or care what I have on my box, as long as whatever I produce is cross-platform--which it is.

Not quite. Your browser identifies itself as running under Windows (I hope you're not using the junky MSIE), which gets counted by web survey companies, and then leads to decisions to abandon Linux as a target.

The fact that you use non-portable documents instead of banning those who produce them and instructing them to switch to a portable format increaes the Microsoft monopoly, because those who produce those documents now 'know' that it's OK to send you (and therefore anyone) those documents. This will lead to more non-portable documents, and thus more people using Windows, some paying for it.

1) Gaming compatibility. There simply is no alternative to using a Microsoft OS if you want to be able to play the vast majority of games that have been made for the PC in the last 20 years. Sure, you can run *most* DOS games in DR-DOS--but not all of them, and at any rate you'd still have to boot a Windows variant to play all the Windows games. Some Windows games will work under WINE, but the vast majority will not. Hence, as someone with a very huge collection of games spanning 20 years, many of which I actually like to play rather than just have sit there, I need to use a Microsoft OS. Linux will never cut it in that department unless the Win9x codebase is opened, which is of course very unlikely.

In my home net I have a linux PC and a WinXP machine. I have recently bought several games from Loki, and guess what- now my Linux PC is used mostly for games. Much more than the XP PC which only runs a few older (for us) games that we already completed

Many game vendors are starting to realize the advantages of Linux for gaming and release their games for Linux as well as Windows. By buying games for Linux, you support the Linux world and fight Microsoft. By pirating Microsoft Windows but paying for Windows software you signal to the companies that they should release their software only for Windows, thus supporting Microsoft.

2) Application compatibility and continuity. Because Windows has been the dominant platform for many years, people like me are used to using certain applications for certain jobs--they work well for us and we aren't interested in changing to a new OS and trying to find an equivalent which probably is not there in the same fashion. This is especially true since so many Linux apps are enigmatically named (how are we supposed to find them in the first place?) and not geared for GUI users. Most end users like me have no desire to leave a well-mapped-out GUI app with buttons and menus in intuitive places and universal shortcuts (most Windows apps or Mac apps conform to the same shortcut key layouts--Linux apps often do not) for a Linux app that isn't very intuitively layed out because it either caters mostly to CLI users or was coded by CLI users who didn't really put thought into layout for GUI folk.

Productivity studies have shown that a well-traided CLI user is much more productive than the respective well-trained GUI user. This is simply because it's faster for the brain to type a command than to precisely point and click several menus with the mouse. You aren't typing with your mouse, are you?

With that said, Linux does have intuitive GUIs and even lets you simulate Windows for various tasks. Learning the names of apps is quite trivial and can be done in a few minutes, and it's always good to learn your tools throughly before using them. You have been using an OS for begginers. It is time to evolve to a more advanced OS, to a system that does what you want it do, and not what it wants.

Anyone knows instantly what Media Player does--it plays media, like movies and sounds. Great. But how is an end user supposed to know what xanim does?

Have you tried Mplayer? Better name for you? It's also a much better app for media playing.

My time is too valuable to waste learning.

But your time is so unvaluable to waste on using your tools sub-optimally. Think on how much time you waste by not knowing keyboard shortcuts, or by rebooting your system and restoring data after a crash, or by reading /. for that matter :)

I need ACDSee for viewing pictures, and I won't even touch that crap that comes built-in to WinXP for doing so.

Have you ever tried GQview? It works real well.

I need Photoshop for image editing--The Gimp is okay, and I can do some script-fu with it that I can't under Photoshop, but it isn't as powerful in most respects, is more clunky and difficult to use, and lacks CMYK color separation which is a must for many graphic artists

Hmmm.... Image|Mode|Decompose...|CMYK. Was that so hard?

3) Compatibility with the outside world. This isn't important to everyone. Indeed, even Mac users get used to a certain amount of non-interoperability. But to some of us it's damn important. I'm not talking about just the whole Office .doc thing, either--an awful lot of media is Windows-only, for example. There are codecs which will never be available on Linux, but I have no problem finding them for Windows. Why should I put up with not being able to use a film clip, when I could have done so with Windows?

If you are talking about "Windows Media Player", then just use Mplayer, which supports almost all Media Player codecs. If you are talking about Quicktime, why should you use a non-portable codec? If you are referring to RealPlayer, there is a linux version available.

Again, not everyone cares, but some of us do. There are some pretty strange and obscure file formats that have been developed over the years, but almost alays there is software for Windows which will handle it. The same just can't be said for Linux, or to a large extent for Mac. That's not to say closed and hard-to-deal-with formats are good--I always try to use open and readily-available formats that anyone can use or view. But there are a lot of people out there who don't do the same and there are also a lot of legacy files to be dealt with.

Actually, quite a lot of 'obscure' formats are supported in the standard apps available on Linux, such as ImageMagick. Which obscure formats have you had problems with?

B) Chasing Amy uses (pirated) Windows. Microsoft gets no money from him. Whatever he produces and sends over the net is cross-platform.

But now - Chasing Amy pays for Windows software, which triggers more windows software to be produced, thus making it even harded for people such as Chasing Amy to switch to Linux, and increasing Micro$oft's monopoly. In addition, Chasing Amy finds a job somewhere, and his employer is required to purchase a M$ license for him, thus giving money directly to Microsoft. It's all about market share. By using windows you increase the amount of licenses that will be sold, either by not influencing people not to buy windows, or by using purchased versions of Windows in public places and at work, or even by purchasing Windows software and games instead of Linux software and games, thus dragging Loki to bankrupcy and making game developers think developing for Linux is a bad idea.

In either case, the results are the same. Whether I use Linux or not has no bearing at all on anything external to my box. Internally it makes sure that I can use media and documents I wouldn't be able to use with Linux, and it maintains my use of the apps I am familiar with. Externally the world doesn't know or care what I have on my box, as long as whatever I produce is cross-platform--which it is.

Not quite. Your browser identifies itself as running under Windows (I hope you're not using the junky MSIE), which gets counted by web survey companies, and then leads to decisions to abandon Linux as a target.

The fact that you use non-portable documents instead of banning those who produce them and instructing them to switch to a portable format increaes the Microsoft monopoly, because those who produce those documents now 'know' that it's OK to send you (and therefore anyone) those documents. This will lead to more non-portable documents, and thus more people using Windows, some paying for it.

It seems the "basically GPL" points to the facts that they will NOT distribute binaries of the program for the following reasons:

• The program contains several files with incompatible licenses especially on the redistribution clauses
• The program uses special hardware like MMX, SSE, fastmemcpy for optimization. A binary can not cope with a lot of hardware specialization. (So binary distribution will make the program appear terribly slow)
• MPlayer is not plugin-based, libraries are compiled into the binary, the number of possible library versions makes distribution of a few different binaries almost impossible

But then, some quotes from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/, their homepage. That give a slightly different view of the developers:

There is a topic about current affairs on Slashdot. It's very lame, offtopic, and nobody RTFM'ed there, so won't get a link. :)

Update: I have one message to the Slashdot folks: if you want binaries to be distributable, send working runtime CPU detect code+etc, not just shout "yes, let's support projects that are more opensource". Opensource is about helping and contributing. We rather develop new features than piss with licenses. If you don't like it, why do you use MPlayer? Over and out.

Q: The GUI isn't usable with icewm, because some panel are over the movie!! A: Known, icewm is shit and dictatoric. Unsolvable. In detail: icewm sucks because its taskbar overrides GUI's window resize queries. If it asks for resize to 800x600, then it resizes window to 800x(600-taskbar_size). It's bad. Very bad. In short: shit.

On the MPlayer News page, it is also claimed that WarpVision forgot to mention the authors of ffmpeg in their credits file. The strange thing is, ffmpeg is released under the GPL, and is also used by MPlayer -- then, I wonder, how can MPlayer not be released under the GPL?

Now who's in violation of the GPL here?

Their explanation is extremely vague. I understand why you couldn't include the Windows DLL files, the Divx4 codec, etc. with a binary distribution. But why couldn't you compile it with the FFmpeg GPL codecs only, and distribute that as a binary if you make the source code available? The FFmpeg decoders seem better than the Windows DLL files anyway, and they can run on non-x86 platforms.

On a press conference, A'rpi said the big truth: he hates GPL! Well this sounds very rude from him, but let everyone know what happened! The poor fella tried to compile a flash disk driver into the kernel to boot from it and... it wouldn't! The little geezer is non-GPL so he can't be compiled into the kernel, which is in fact GPL! Let me quote him: rts NOW! GPL SUX - Utalom!!! - kibaszott szemet! - which I now don't want to trto english. Now he has rm -rf /*GPL* in crontab.

Order MPlayer - Boycott GPL! T-shirts NOW!

Go to Mplayers Home Page, they used the entire code of Mplayer and only changed the output plugin.

Incidently, I am this }{ close to losing the GUI alltogethor. With the fantastic (but slightly unwiedly)mplayer, and Q3 now working from the CLI, I see little purpose (personally) for those quaint little GUIs.

A mouse is what you play Quake with.

Get MPlayer... it plays DivX movies very well (on x86 machines).

The latest mplayer supports WMV playback.

Try mplayer

I use linux with mplayer, and i had no trouble playing the wma :)

It's windows media video. On linux, play it with mplayer.

I haven't got mplayer running properly, but I'll probably stick with avifile et al until the mplayer developers get a clue and a less childish attitude.

Apart from the now irrelevant gcc 2.96 issue and silly warnings (which by the way will require the user to enter "gcc 2.96 is broken" or something similar as a "password" to get it to compile), they abuse people actually trying to use their product on their "support" mailing list.
Or take this example from the FAQ:

Q: I compiled MPlayer with libdvdcss/libdivxdecore support, but when I try to start it, it says:
> error while loading shared libraries: lib*.so.0: cannot load shared object file: No such file or directory
I checked up on the file and it IS there in /usr/local/lib.
A: What are you doing on Linux? Can't you install a library? Why do we get these questions? It's not MPlayer specific at all! Add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig . Or install it to /usr/lib , because if you can't solve the /usr/local problem, you are careless enough to do such things.

Note that instructions on how to install those libs are nowhere to be found in the README, INSTALL or other docs. I also guess lots of people install them by RPM.

After seeing the replies on their ML, where they seem to make up for their broken English with a "fuck y00 luz3rz" in every third sentence, I decided to use another player whose developers don't consider their code too hallow for mere usage.

I haven't got mplayer running properly, but I'll probably stick with avifile et al until the mplayer developers get a clue and a less childish attitude.

Apart from the now irrelevant gcc 2.96 issue and silly warnings (which by the way will require the user to enter "gcc 2.96 is broken" or something similar as a "password" to get it to compile), they abuse people actually trying to use their product on their "support" mailing list.
Or take this example from the FAQ:

Q: I compiled MPlayer with libdvdcss/libdivxdecore support, but when I try to start it, it says:
> error while loading shared libraries: lib*.so.0: cannot load shared object file: No such file or directory
I checked up on the file and it IS there in /usr/local/lib.
A: What are you doing on Linux? Can't you install a library? Why do we get these questions? It's not MPlayer specific at all! Add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig . Or install it to /usr/lib , because if you can't solve the /usr/local problem, you are careless enough to do such things.

Note that instructions on how to install those libs are nowhere to be found in the README, INSTALL or other docs. I also guess lots of people install them by RPM.

After seeing the replies on their ML, where they seem to make up for their broken English with a "fuck y00 luz3rz" in every third sentence, I decided to use another player whose developers don't consider their code too hallow for mere usage.

Note: gcc 2.96 is RedHat's UNOFFICIAL (it can be found only on RedHat sites, or in RedHat-based distributions) and BUGGY gcc release. gcc 2.96 is TOTALLY unsupported by us, because it simply SKIPS or badly compiles some MMX codes! Important: this is NOT an MPlayer-specific problem, numerous other projects (DRI, avifile, etc..) have problems with this shit too. DO NOT USE gcc 2.96 !!! If you don't want to downgrade, use the disable-gcc-checking option to avoid this check, but DO NOT SEND BUGREPORTS OR COMPLAIN, it's *YOUR* fault! Get ready for misterious crashes, no-picture bugs, strange noises... REALLY!

Any idea why? Is the 2.96 release from Redhat all that bad? I don't seem to have any trouble with mplayer on my system (RH 7.1, all patched up)

I use Windows Media Player with Wine to watch my...uh...Multimedia Presentations. It really does a decent job with AVI files. I have only tested it with the older non-"themeable" release of Media Player.

I've found that mplayer does a really good job of playing mpeg/avi/divx files in Linux.

Try MPlayer for playing AVI's.
It's better than most avi players out there. There's even a skinnable GUI on the way :-)
There's no .deb package, but it's damn easy to install (most options are autodetected).

It works with a remote control too :-)

• avifile
• MPlayer
• XAnim

Note that the avifile project has links to many other players...

XAnim is (AFAIK) the oldest player. It supports some AVIs but (IIRC) not ASFs...

Most of the ASF et. al. support comes from using the Windows binary codecs...