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MPlayer 1.0Pre1 Is Here
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!"
.. 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?
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.
.. the ability to save streaming content straight to HD wouldn't go amiss either.
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....
...when I submitted a story a couple months ago about how mplayer now has windows support nobody seemed interested. It's not like this is a new feature of the 1.x version...
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Oh yea.. Zoom player. That wouldn't play my streaming mpeg video from ffserver either. Seems the only player that will is mplayer.
Microsoft Windows runs on stress and frustration.
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/) 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 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.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
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 as I thought sharing it was the least I could do.
Another fantastic feature is that with mencoder you can convert crap closed formats such as QuickTime (yes, with the Sorensen codec) and RealMedia into a standard MPEG4 format like XviD.
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 doesn't support DVD navigation. If it ever does it would be a no-brainer, for me anyway.
If you have had stability problems with Xine, that's unlucky because I would rate it just ahead of Videolan, usability wise. My advice would be to set aside a day or a Weekend just for building and testing Mplayer, Xine and Videolan, reading all the documentation and trying different optimizations and runtime configurations until you find the one which suits you best.
And how do I use it then if I have a media machine with an IR mouse? For a home entertainment system this will not work.
(See MoviX^2 for the functionality that I require...)
I'm confused... help me out here.
:)
I installed xine-lib, and gxine, and kmplayer. I haven't installed xine-ui.
I have Xine installed.... without the Xine gui.
I have two different frontends to Xine.
So why do you say:
Until you can seperate the gui out of Xine easily at compile time... Xine cant even compete....
And how do you get moderated up for it?
By the way, I prefer mplayer
While mplayer is an excellent piece of software for decoding video, mencoder (Encoding software) has a lot of bugs and limitations.
.mpg-Files fail, rebuilding indices also fail from time to time.
Simple things, like concatenating 2
Hopefully also the encoding part (also the documentation including examples) will improve.
Sure.
... zoom player will be deleted from all boxes withing the next few days (if I find the time).
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
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.)
On the other side of the screen it all looked so easy.
Explain that to my mother, or my grandmother. Trust me, they need big graphical buttons.. my mother doesn't even know which buttons are play and stop on her VCR unless there are words to describe them.