MPlayer Features

MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems (see the documentation). It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies.

Another great feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too! Most of them support software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen. MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the Siemens DVB, DXR2 and DXR3/Hollywood+.

MPlayer has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls. European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic and Korean fonts are supported along with 12 subtitle formats (MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS and our own: MPsub). DVD subtitles (SPU streams, VOBsub and Closed Captions) are supported as well.

License

MPlayer is available under the GNU General Public License version 2. It is not available under any other licensing terms, not even for substantial amounts of money. If you have questions about the GNU GPL, consult the GPL FAQ.

Supported Input Formats

Supported Video and Audio Codecs

most important video codecs:

most important audio codecs:

The codec status page has the complete list and is updated daily.

Supported Video Output Devices

general:

card specific:

special:

See the video card section of the documentation for more details.

Supported Audio Output Devices

Speed

Most of time-critical parts are optimized for Intel/AMD (MMX/MMX2/SSE/SSE2/3DNow!/3DNowEx), PowerPC G4 (Altivec), SPARC (VIS), ARM PDAs and the Sony Playstation 2.

GUI

MPlayer comes with a GUI that is not built by default. The GUI section of the documentation explains how to enable it. Several external MPlayer frontends provide alternative GUIs.

Bug Reports

Before reporting a bug, please try the latest development version (Subversion HEAD) first. Quite possibly your bug is already known and fixed, even though it may still be present in the version you are using. Furthermore, please read all of the documentation that comes with MPlayer. Solutions for most problems can be found there.

If you are confident that your problem is a real bug in the current version, dive into the bug reporting guidelines and follow the instructions. Failing to do that will just waste the time of all participants in the communication while you are asked to provide the information described there anyway. It is also likely to get you ignored completely. So please take the time to create quality bug reports.

History

If you are interested in Chronicles of MPlayer Creation, they may be found at our history page.