Slashdot Mirror
MPlayer Developers Interviewed
cruocitae writes "Three of the MPlayer developers just gave an interview, talking about the "mysterious" versioning system of their software and shared a few secrets about the upcoming releases, for example some words about the long-awaited Windows GUI, and of course, DVD menus. Project integrity also was a subject.."
I tried MPlayer a year or two ago for Windows. I'm sure it's much improved since then. I've been sticking with BSplayer though since it has so much functionality and usable skins. It has easy aspect ratio correction, low CPU usage, and key re-mapping, among it's many useful features. The key controls is what converted me from the other players I tried.
Anyone tried both more recently?
I don't want to use a GUI.
Neither do I. I have xine called from my myth box, which doesn't have a keyboard.
xine doesn't play many files I try, and I don't want to figure out how to fix it.
I haven't had any problems with VOBs, MPGs, AVIs, ISOs.
mplayer plays video files on slow machines smoother than xine.
Subjective. I've had smooth dvd playback on a pIII 550 ( coppermine ).
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
In my experience, mplayer runs faster (and has mencoder). Xine always seems to desync audio and video when fast forwarding in large files, on every system I have tried it on. Also, I've never had a problem opening a file in mplayer, but I have in xine.
I'll agree that xine is better for DVDs, though!
If you can't convince them, convict them.
VLC seems to be the fastest client between quicktime and mplayer on OSX. Both VLC and MPlayer were native builds too (no xdarwin). I have a slow, old 600mhz ibook, and I am able to surf the web, open apps, etc, and really never see choppy video. Especially with large video files MPlayer and Quicktime seem to bog down, I was unable to watch a 70 mb episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force without horrible framerates on either QT or MPlayer, but VLC worked perfectly.
MPlayer is very sensitive to compiler version and optimization flags. Try a different compiler, or a different version of the same compiler.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
Segfaults are very, very rare. If you are seeing one, you should report it: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.h
Major problems like that, always get fixed quickly.
As I said, segfaults are very rare these days. Most of the time segfaults are reported, it's buggy hardware (hot CPU, RAM, videocard, etc.) or a known-buggy version of GCC (2.96, 3.3, etc).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Xine is much slower, has a terrible interface, supports fewer audio/video codecs, takes longer to get support for newer codecs, doesn't do ANY encoding at all, doesn't support a fraction as many output audio/video devices. Doesn't have a fraction of the great video/audio filters that MPlayer does. Uses far, far more CPU-time than MPlayer. Has a god-awful interface, and no simple command-line version. Murders puppies. Doesn't include options like allowing you to output JPEGs out of every 100ths frame. Doesn't allow you to process the video, then output to yuv4mpeg for encoding with other programs. etc.
The difference between XINE and MPlayer are really the difference between Windows and Unix... Do you want a monolithic program, which can't be scripted, and has many, many restrictions imposed on it, or a small, simple tool that you can script to manipulate and modify data any way you choose?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Here is how I attack trying to play a video file or DVD on Linux:
:-(
First choice: VLC
Second Choice: Mplayer
Third Choice: Xine
Fourth Choice: Boot into Windoze
I have a 400 mhz G4 Powerbook and MPlayer plays everything smoothly (usually even in reduced CPU mode).
However, if I have the Preview function in Finder turned on, and it tries to preview a 700 mb DivX, I end up killing Finder because it takes all CPU resources until it's done previewing (seemingly forever).
I don't use MPlayer, largely because the built-in UI (or lack thereof) makes it a pain to deal with. There are front-ends for it, but it's just not worth the trouble.
MEncoder, on the other hand is amazingly powerful. It's also a pain in the butt to use. I also have to say, the support, at least on the MEncoder forum is very lacking. When I first started using it, I was largely derided for not knowing all about video encoding to begin with and got more than one RTFM response.
The documentation is extensive, but the organization could definitely use some work and a few more real world examples would be helpful.
That said, after a month or so of struggling with it, I am pretty competent with it now and have yet to find a situation where it can't do what I want it to do. Convert from one format to another, resync video, make DVD compatible MPEGS (though it doesn't compose DVDs), etc. It's got a variet of filters, including I think 4 just for de-interlacing (I do a lot of TV captures to raw MPEG that need to be converted to AVI).
So the program itself is excellent. The support however, could definitely use some work. If you want to see some newbie bashing, the mencoder mailing list definitely a good place to hang out.
I use MPlayer all the time on Mac OS X.
The problem is seeing any visible progress on this port. Or even fixing major bugs and releasing a build.
The current release is the MPlayer-dev-CVS-050904.dmg (i.e. September 4th 2005). This release had a massive bug that rendered the playlist an unusable -- you could add items to it. And the menu bar was not being hidden in full screen mode on the default video renderer. I'd label both of these showstoppers (breaks major functionality) and would expect a fix. It's now 8 months later and not even a dev CVS build.
So I continue to the use the MPlayer-dev-CVS-050724.dmg version.
I've never been able to find nightly builds of the Mac OS X port, either. Not through lack of trying but maybe I missed something.
Is any active development taking place on the Mac version?
I've played with a number of various multimedia applications, and I always come back to mplayer. Personally, I use KMplayer when I want a GUI, since it has a few nice features that GMplayer doesn't (drag and drop playlist, maintains the correct aspect ratio of the file when resizing, nicer integration with KDE). I still occasionally use Ogle for DVDs, but I'm eagerly anticipating MPlayer supporting DVD menus.
For those of you who might have stuck with Xine based players and haven't played around much with MPlayer, there are a few reasons I really like it:
The largest reason is that it plays bloody everything. I've personally never come across a file that I couldn't open with MPlayer. The worst I've ever run into is in some files that are slightly corrupted I've had to use the -idx flag to reindex the file so that I can gracefully skip over bad sections of the file instead of the video just stopping playing. I find this particularly handy when I'm downloading television shows off bittorrent and the seeders all go away when I'm at like 90%.
Mplayer also seems more lightweight ot me than Xine. Most of the time, if I'm watching video at my computer, it's because I'm doing something that's taking long enough that I'm sitting at the desk waiting for it to finish (compiling a lot of software, doing 3D rendering, etc.) so it's nice to be able to dedicate more cycles to whatever real work is getting done while still being able to relax with a video.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
"monolithic" is what makes mplayer feel to me. It's just me? Lots of options, yes, really versatile, but....
Don't get me wrong. I've zero idea about mplayer internals, but I wonder why ej: mplayer is a big binary monolith instead of something more modular which can be used by other people.
Xine may not be perfect, but I've seen people reusing xine in other places: enlightenment 17, for one. Or totem-xine which has, BTW, a firefox plugin to allow people see videos with a gui to handle videos, something that linux desktop has been missing for years (and don't even mention the useful but ugly hack that mozplugger is, please). Not to mention that it's used by nautilus to do things like ej: generate thumbnails. Mplayer may be a good video player, but xine is a *useful* video player.
BSPlayer does not link or bundle in a full ffdshow library. It can leverage the ffdshow DirectShow filter to play a lot of media types without using other WM/DS libraries (people often prefer the features of ffdshow in MPEG2/MPEG4 over filters bundled with DVD drives and/or DivX). Usually you find BSPlayer and FFDShow bundled together, for example, in the KLite Codec Pack.
:-/
However, BSPlayer is a much better parser of video container formats (ASF, WMV, AVI, OGM) and MPEG transport streams than most other players out there (maybe with the exception of VLC). All of them are better than any versions Windows Media Player.
So it can handle broken, badly indexed, or partially downloaded files with ease.
Additionally, like VLC, mplayer and MPC, it can handle extended features in video containers that many other players (Windows Media Player included) omit. For example, multiple video streams, subtitles, multiple audio tracks, etc.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Under absolutely ALL circumstances. MPlayer has been heavily optimized for speed, while XINE hasn't. I've never before seen ANYONE claim Xine was EVER faster.
If you're actually seeing something like that, and not just trolling, either you got a poorly made binary package, or you were doing something like using the wrong output method for your system.
Also something I have NEVER heard from ANYONE, ANYWHERE. MPlayer is much more tolerant of errors, and will play far more media types. If you're seeing some bug, you should report it, and perhaps provide a sample.
vidix is faster than XV in just about all cases. gl is faster if your drivers have OpenGL support, and MUCH, MUCH, MUCH faster on HD material.
svga/fbdev support makes it possible to play videos even without X11 installed, and can be faster in some cases.
No, I'm not just talking about encoding. Good inverse telecine filters are absolutely necessary in the US and other NTSC countries. There are plenty of other filters like overlays for interactive on-screen graphic interfaces (eg. Freevo), filters to fix videos which have been improperly encoded, like deinterlacing telecined content, numerous postprocessing filters, filters to remove TV station logos, etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Yeah, cryptic, three character variable names like "osd_show_percentage", "stream_dump_type", "too_fast_frame_cnt" and "frame_time_remaining". How cryptic! Whatever could those mean?!?
Bullshit. I just checked. mplayer.c has 3 pointers to void, and one pointer to pointer of void. A quick search through some other files found zero void pointers. The code in the loader section does have a few, but it's hardly the most common datatype.
The only part of your post that's even remotely true is "All that said, the program is fantastic." On that we agree. mplayer kicks ass.
Maybe not