MPlayer is an open source cross-platform media player. Its name is an acronym for "Movie Player" is. MPlayer is one of the oldest Linux video player, has 18 years of history, it inspired many other media players. Some well-known MPlayer-based media player are:
- MPV
- SMPlayer
- KPlayer
- GNOME MPlayer
- Depth player
MPlayer is popular, mainly because it supports a variety of video files. It can play MPEG, VOB, AVI, OGG / OGM, VIVO, ASF / WMA / WMV, QT / MOV / MP4, FLI, RM, NupleVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, PVA files. It can also play VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, RealMedia, and DivX movies.
Another key feature of MPlayer is broad support for the output device. It can be used with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, DirectFB and SDL.
Some major features of MPlayer are:
- It supports a variety of video, audio and subtitle files
- Supports multiple output drivers
- Based on the open source ffmpeg
- You can save all streamed content to a file
- For H.265 / HEVC hardware acceleration of VDPAU
- TV and DVB support
- GUI improvements
- Open source and cross-platform
You can install it from the release version of the software center.
In Ubuntu, MPlayer can be obtained from the Universe repository. Therefore, make sure that you have a complete Universe repository.
sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt update
Then you can use the following command to install mplayer:
sudo apt install mplayer mplayer-gui
Keep in mind, it is a command-line tool on MPlayer nature. You must start from such a terminal:
mplayer <path_to_video_file>
It wants to play a video in the GUI interface, you can see all the encoding and decoding in the terminal, as follows:
Video player is not the most convenient way to start from the terminal. This is the reason there is mplayer-gui package. This is a minimal GUI application, you can find it in the menu and use it for playback. However, mplayer-gui there is an error in the latest version of Ubuntu, it may crash or not start at all.
For example, the following error appears on my Ubuntu 18.04.3:
Error inskin config at line 6:PNG read error in /usr/share/mplayer/skins/default/main
That is why I prefer the UI better MPV player. This is the open source MPlayer branch. You can also use SMPlayer , which is another video player built on top of MPlayer.
to sum up
What do you think Mplayer? Have you ever used it? Do you prefer VLC and MPlayer than other video players? Share your point of view.
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