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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.
Mplayer rule them all? Yeah right, I guess Linux that zealots haven't ever heard Zoom Player. (It rules already)
Zoom Player
http://archonon.sytes.net/
here
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
Download MPlayer
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
.. the ability to save streaming content straight to HD wouldn't go amiss either.
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.
For Windows, I would suggest using Media Player Classic. 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.
This amazes me. I hadn't tried either of these for a year or more. Last week my girlfriend and I were surfing porn, and because she's so ignorant about these thing, she wanted to download some movies. They were WMPs, and I told her we probably couldn't play them, but that I'd try anyway. I tried mplayer first, because slashdot is always raving about it, and it handled the WMPs, so we went surfing for everything we could find -- I must've had six or more formats downloaded by the time we finished. I was amazed by mplayer, and Goy took me upstairs to practice what we had seen. Surfing porn makes her so horny
Anyway, two days later, I decided to let Goy look at the files again. I was in the lab, and it has only xterms with no xv extension, so I tried all the movies with xine. It's a little painful with a 10Mb/s network card, but they all worked, just as mplayer did. Goy pulled my pants down and started on me right there.
God Bless Mplayer and Xine!
True story, not inflammatory rhetoric
Put identity in the browser.
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.
They can play anything mplayer 9x Can.
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 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 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?)
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.
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
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
Real Alternative
Quicktime Alternative
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.
Keep your Xine....
Mplayer is built right. A command line player and a GUI that is seperate.
That way mplayer can be used as a part of a larger project... freevo ring a bell?
It blows my mind how many projects for linux are rendered useless for many uses simply because the programmers think that the GUI MUST be a part of the app...
It doesn't and makes your program less useful.
mplayer is the best player out for linux. Until you can seperate the gui out of Xine easily at compile time... Xine cant even compete....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
GCC Segfaulted? Can you say "that's most-likely a GCC or hardware problem"?
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
Perhaps it's worth mentioning that Windows Media Player does not download divx? Perhaps it's also worth mentioning that "Joe Windows" somehow always manages to get hold of the divx codec anyway?
All the codecs are available for download off the mplayer site, along with the program itself. There's no problem here.
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?
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
#!/bin/csh cat $0
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
You had to think about it for a second? Just what kind of raving KDE/OSX/Windoze/IceWM/Enlightenment/GNUStep fanatic are you?
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.
And for the many users of Mandrake, MPlayer with the proper codecs (and many other good programs) are available as rpms at PLF
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.
u bcmp=258:vmax_b_frames=1"
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:s
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.
MPlayer is fully functional without any GUI. So what's wrong with using it without a GUI then?
I think people are determined to use MPlayer (and everything else) from a GUI, just because that's what they've been used-to in the Windows and Mac world... NOT because there is any legitimate reason to do so.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
Because teenage pranks are fun when you're about to die!
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.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman