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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.
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
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.
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.
I'll start by giving the direct link to Zoom Player.
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.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
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
mencoder http://some-stream/ -oac copy -ovc copy -o somefile
that works here quite nicely for saving video streams
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.
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.
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 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