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Mplayer Revisited
Joe Barr writes "It's been two years since I first wrote about Mplayer. Maybe the fury of the developers/community reaction to the fact that I dared to criticize them for their treatment of users kept me away. Whatever. Now Mplayer has a pre1 version of release 1.0 out there and it's time for another look." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
The OSX build of MPlayer is very useful, it's the best DivX player for OSX! Of course it plays other formats as well. Thanks MPlayer team!
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I support spreading santorum
MPlayer 0.92 is the current stable release where everything works as expected.
MPlayer 1.0-pre1 has some nice new stuff, but even though it has one thing (support for input from v4l devices with hardware MJPEG support) which I've wanted ofr a long time, the current pre-release is much too flakey for me to use, and I've gone back to 0.92.
MPlayer 1.0-pre1 is for writing bug-reports, not reviews.
Unless Mr. Barr had a conscious or subconscious WISH to find things that didn't work right, i don't see why he wrote his review for the pre1 version.
the fact I find most surprising, is that Microsoft hasn't stepped in argueing that the software cannot be called, "MPlayer"
Microsoft's product is called "Media Player". MPLAYER.EXE is merely an antiquated, conventional, DOS-format file name.
If they want their software to gain popularity and more widespread usage, they will.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
VLC from VideoLAN accepts almost all the formats MPlayer groks. The major exceptions are the ones for which there is no GPL-compatible implementation. It can also transcode streams into different formats, or send them to the network, serve them as HTTP, etc. It is truly cross-platform and the Windows and OS X ports are extremely popular.
God, root, what is difference ?
For those of us who are less than happy about MPlayer's default GUI, there are far better alternatives, like KPlayer for KDE.
Tom.
Oh arse
If you're a fan of mplayer, you might want to check out MoviX which makes bootable mplayer distributions. My favorite variation is MoviX^2. You boot from the movix2 CD, eject the movix2 CD, pop in a CD or DVD with any mplayer supported format, and there you go!
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Please, pretty please, before you talk about something you know nothing about, get your facts straight.
MPlayer currently doesn't contain single line owned by DivX networks. None. Nada. (In past, they used opendivx, and while it was under opensource license, it was neither GPL compatible nor free software).
Nowadays, MPlayer uses libavcodec library from ffmpeg project. It it fully LGPL library, you can find it on sourceforge. The reason that SUSE rips it out is simple - some algorithms are patented (please note that there is a difference between owning copyright on code and owning patent on software). The patents make it impossible to ship binaries as a part of business in some contries. However, shipping source code is OK.
So, that much for your 'warez'.
well there is a windows version :)
www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32-beta
i use mplayer under windows linux and osX
i like that you can begin to watch a movie
while your downloading it that just rocks
"... I made the Mplayer binary SUID and that helped. ..." /proc filesystem. Use this command to enable RTC for normal users:
/proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq
i dunno why he would do that but if it is about RTC then a closer look to mplayer (excelent) documentation would show this:
If you are running kernel 2.4.19pre8 or later you can adjust the maximum RTC frequency for normal users through the
echo 1024 >
Smile... tomorrow will be worse.
Last time I checked, packaging MPlayer had major license problems. I believe at some time it was not even allowed to package according to a clause in the MPlayer license.
But even now there are problems because of all the libraries which are not in the GPL or any other Free Software license. And this is a problem mainly for Debian which has pretty rigid license terms.
Just checked and yes, there are still issues. See http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design6/news.html #debianandsusesux.
Do not run SUID root if there is any other way to get the desired performance. From: http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/339193 Severity: HIGH (if playing ASX streaming content) LOW (if playing only normal files) Description: A remotely exploitable buffer overflow vulnerability was found in MPlayer. A malicious host can craft a harmful ASX header, and trick MPlayer into executing arbitrary code upon parsing that header. MPlayer versions affected: MPlayer 0.90pre series MPlayer 0.90rc series MPlayer 0.90 MPlayer 0.91 MPlayer 1.0pre1 MPlayer versions unaffected: MPlayer releases before 0.90pre1 MPlayer 0.92 MPlayer HEAD CVS Notification status: Developers were notified on 2003.09.24 Fix was commited into HEAD CVS at 2003.09.25 02:36:36 CEST MPlayer 0.92 (vuln-fix-only release) was released on 2003.09.25 12:00:00 CEST Patch availability: A patch is available for all vulnerable versions. Suggested upgrading methods: MPlayer 1.0pre1 users should upgrade to latest CVS MPlayer 0.91 (and below) users should upgrade to 0.92 OR latest CVS MPlayer 0.92 is available for download. -- Gabucino MPlayer Core Team
[ReidNews]
Two applications that do the exact same thing. Most sane people would see that as pointless and redundant. It's a waste of resources.
Never put all your eggs in one basket.
Even more funny, I did the same thing last night on a Out-Of-the-Box SuSE 8.2 System; I just had to remove the useless crippled mplayer that comes with SuSE.
/dev/dvd -> /dev/sr0 amd enable DMA access for my DVD-drive to play dvds. Ah, and I had to run it as root, and you must not forget xhost + then to allow it to open a window. And Mplayer is the most blithering piece of software I know, but I found these messages were generally helpful.
At first I was a bit scared by all this stuff about installing additional codecs in the documentation, and I even downloaded ffmpeg because I follwed the documentation step by step, but later I found out it applies to the cvs checkout only, is already included in the release tarballs.
The fact is: for most cases, the included ffmpeg and other included codecs will already play more stuff than any other player, and installation was as painless as you describe, I just had to add a symlink
I really love mplayer because it is fast and responsive, delivers a much better quality than any windows player I used, has the freedom to jump ten seconds with arrow keys, ignories dvd no-skip zones, allows to adjust audio/video sync, to easyly correct aspect ratio, to adjust pan-scan (E/W key) and has really good deinterlacing for my kite surfing dvds.
If there is a piece of software that make me feel liberated, it is mplayer; it is the most single reason for me to boot linux as there is nothing comparable for windows. (Yesterday I found out mplayer runs under cygwin, but I didnt try yet)
p.
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
it doesn't seem to support all the same formats that mplayer does [...] Xine doesn't play .asf files
If you install the Win32 codecs, Xine will happily play all those formats you mention.
I've a few mpg's that mysteriously don't play on xine
I've a few mpg's that not misteriously don't play but on one of the players that i use (xine, VLC, mplayer...) and on none of the other. The "mplayer plays all files that other players won't play" myth is just that: a myth. You will always find files that are not playable on all players (or even worse, are playable on only one player).
mplayer renders much more sharply and clearly than xine
You are probably not using the Xv mode in Xine. If you use XShm (compatible with almost any hardware, but slower) the image is kinda blocky indeed. But any player (not just Xine or mplayer) that uses the Xv mode has the same sharpness. I actually spent some time figuring out this issue and i'm pretty sure about what i said above.
Like i said, both players (Xine and mplayer) are pretty much the same, except that Xine handles DVDs a lot better (mplayer's implementation is only the bare minimum).
Ask a specific question. If you say "Can someone help me to get X working...", you're going to get a "no". Why? Think of what you actually just asked -- you, one of zillions of people, just said "will you commit an unknown amount of time to providing me with support for free".
While you did an excellent job summarizing the points, Eric S. Raymond wrote an article that I found particularly helpful, and after reading and putting into practice what he was saying (all of which made sense) i started getting a lot more help from projects, and was actually able to contribute a lot more in general. Much more satisfying, I say.
Like what I said? You might like my music