News

2012-02-17, Friday :: Playing back BluRay discs
posted by Compn

Correction

MPlayer does support encrypted BluRay playback, though not all steps are handled by MPlayer itself. The two alternative methods use the URL schemes bd:// (always supports decryption, but you need the key for each and every disk in ~/.dvdcss/KEYDB.cfg and only works well with very simple BluRays, similar to dvd:// vs. dvdnav://) and br:// (uses libbluray and should support the same as VideoLAN in the link below but that is untested).

End correction

MPlayer needs some documentation on how to play encrypted discs. Patches are welcome. VideoLAN users can follow the instructions here | Mirror

I have not tested, but it looks like it works on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. Thanks to whoever created this and hopefully no one will have to rip the discs to a hard drive before playing now.

2011-12-15, Thursday :: The Internet Needs Your Help!
posted by Compn

Today, a bill that would create America's first Internet censorship system is going to a full committee for a vote, and is likely to pass. Please call or email or write your congresscritter now!

If you are not in the USA, you still need to talk to your friends who are in the USA and get them to call. You can also petition the state department.

2011-04-25, Monday :: MPlayer Project back online.
posted by Compn

MPlayer's services are operational again. We were unable to move the physical server at this time, but the data has arrived at our new host safely.

Status:

The mailing lists have been reindexed, so old urls will point at incorrect mails again. The website /DOCS/ arent updating, so please use the SVN documentation for now.

If you find any problems with the website, please report them on our Bugzilla.

2011-04-15, Friday :: MPlayer server is moving.
posted by Compn

Due to some reorganizations, the MPlayer project server will be moving soon. There will be some downtime for the mailing lists and svn server while things are in transit.

Join us on IRC while we wait for the server and DNS to propagate! Connect to irc.freenode.net and join the #mplayer channel.

2011-03-26, Saturday :: MPlayer is now Multi Threaded
posted by Compn

Thanks to FFmpeg and its project in the Google Summer of Code program, we now have multi threaded support for playing back H.264 and other codecs.
To enable threading run mplayer -lavdopts threads=N file.mkv where N is the number of threads you want to use.

You will need to have the latest SVN MPlayer for this. Please report any bugs you find to our Bugzilla.

2011-01-30, Sunday :: MPlayer 1.0rc4 released
posted by the release team

Yes, we can!

MPlayer 1.0rc4 continues the tradition of long overdue, but better late than never releases. It has been tested thoroughly to work with the FFmpeg 0.6 branch. It will be useful to distros and other users relying on FFmpeg 0.6. To get the latest and greatest in features and bug fixes, Subversion HEAD should be a better fit.

1.0rc4 once again adds a slew of new binary codecs and leverages all the stuff added to FFmpeg. Notable additions are VP8 decoding, H.264 bug fixes and speedups, unencrypted Blu-ray support. Network streams can now be played through FFmpeg, there has been quite a bit of subtitle work and Ogg and Matroska demuxer defaults were switched to libavformat. The window position is now decided by the window manager.

Our constant efforts to clean up the codebase continue as usual. A ton of compiler warnings disappeared and there have been refactorings all around. External library copies have been synchronized with upstream. The internal liba52 copy is gone and it is now possible to build against external libmpeg2 and libmpg123.

MPlayer 1.0rc4 can be downloaded by HTTP or FTP.

MD5SUM: 1699c94de39da9c4c5d34e8f58e418f0
SHA1SUM: 36dfaeda726896b6831d66b0fe179623e0385fbe

MPlayer 1.0rc4: "Yes we can"

GUI: Changes towards removing the GUI

Decoders:

Demuxers:

Filters:

Streaming:

Drivers:

Other:

MEncoder:

2011-01-23, Sunday :: Donations through flattr
posted by Diego

It is now possible to donate to MPlayer through flattr. Thank you for your support.

Flattr this

2010-01-23, Sunday :: Daily packages for Ubuntu Users!
posted by siretart

As a special service for Ubuntu users, the mplayer project now provides packages for various versions of Ubuntu. The packages are built twice a week from SVN trunk and run independently of your system libraries.

For instructions how to enable the PPA, please look here

2010-11-11, Thursday :: Happy Birthday MPlayer!
posted by Compn

A message from the creator of MPlayer, Arpi:

Hi,

It was exactly 10 years ago, that I've released first MPlayer version, v0.01: http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/old_stuff/releases/MPlayer-0.01.tar.gz Yes, f*cking 10 years!!!! Nov 11, 2000... Time goes on so fast...

I want to thank you all for the contributions, patches, bugs, docs, testing etc. Especially Michael Niedermayer, Fabrice Bellard and Nick Kurshev, who made it to be the best & fastest open-source player!

And sorry Nick, I made a big mistake rejecting your multi-threaded patches. Unfortunatelly your idea came too early, nobody (at least me) thought that desktop PCs will ever have multiple CPUs... and now that even cheap notebooks and netbooks have multi-core CPUs, it would be very useful for HD playback...

Also special thanks to Gabucino, Pontscho and LGB, for your support in the early days, when everybody thought i'm mad, working on video player for linux...

A'rpi

ps: Albeu, i'll never forgive your playtree patches :)

2010-07-11, Sunday :: Call for Samples
posted by Compn

Some work is being done to the MPEG subtitle code, but we need more samples of DVB and VBI-coded teletext as well as other MPEG-TS/PS subtitles which currently do not work in SVN or which work with -demuxer lavf but not with MPlayer's demuxer.

2010-06-06, Sunday :: Updates and workarounds
posted by Compn

Just some random notes and changes. In SVN the lavf demuxer is now default for Matroska files. We are trying to fix the problems in it, so please report some bugs if you run into them.

If you just want to undo this change, add the following to the end of your config file: 

[extension.mkv]
demuxer=mkv

MPlayer now has the ability to use FFmpeg's network code to access streams. Use mplayer ffmpeg://rtsp://example.invalid/stream.mov syntax to try it.

In general most users should be using SVN MPlayer, as rc3 is over a year old.

2010-05-30, Sunday :: MPlayer 1.0rc3 released
posted by the release team

Godot has arrived.

1.0rc3 was intended to be rolled out over a year ago, but got delayed again and again. Since it is designed to be compatible with the FFmpeg 0.5 branch, it will be useful to distros and other users still tracking said branch. Thus we are now publishing it even though it is outdated even before the day of its release. For general usage current Subversion snapshots should be a better fit, as many bug fixes and new features are available.

This release adds support for a ton of new binary codecs and leverages all the stuff added to FFmpeg. Hardware-accelerated video output over VDPAU is now possible, as is audio output through PulseAudio. MPlayer now runs natively on 64bit OS X, the Wii and on OS/2.

We have switched to the libavformat MOV/MP4 demuxer to avoid maintaining the duplicate MOV/MP4 code. This breaks binary audio/video codecs with MOV/MP4 files. Please use '-demuxer mov' if you still require the binary decoders.

Our constant efforts to clean up the codebase continue as usual. A ton of compiler warnings disappeared and there have been refactorings all around. External library copies have been synchronized with upstream.

There is no need to download binary codec packages if you already have an older version. The codec packs have not been updated.

Note that this code is ancient, e.g. it still contains this long-fixed bug. Unless you are at least deadly allergic to it, use latest SVN instead.

MPlayer 1.0rc3 can be downloaded by HTTP or FTP.

MD5SUM: e1221be5fcad74a2a4185f67ba6c9ae0
SHA1SUM: f533ea1eb2c540402bace0f0fe2317721361510d

MPlayer 1.0rc3: "BikeshedCounter AKA Godot"

Decoders:

Demuxers:

Filters:

Streaming:

FFmpeg/libavcodec:

libmpeg2:

Drivers:

MEncoder:

Others:

libass

Ports:

SWScaler:

2010-02-04, Tuesday :: ATI and Intel Users Rejoice!
posted by Compn

Newer ATI cards and Intel ATOM owners on Linux can utilize the VA-API hardware accelerated H.264, WMV3/VC1, MPEG2 and MPEG4 playback using MPlayer.

Instructions can be found at http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/mplayer-vaapi/

2010-01-01, Friday :: DVDs
posted by Compn

Happy new year! Just a quick note, if you got some DVD's as a gift, mplayer -nocache dvdnav:// should play your new movies better than dvd://.

2009-11-01, Sunday :: Updates
posted by Compn

MPlayer now supports most of the Blu-ray and HD-DVD codecs. You can rip Blu-ray movies on Linux using this guide. There is also an untested patch for playing Blu-ray discs in this thread at doom9.org.

MPlayer is also hosting the rtmpdump project. rtmpdump is a program to download rtmp:// streams. It was previously hosted on SourceForge.

2009-02-20, Friday :: Video Acceleration and You
posted by Compn

There are several ways to speed up the playback of 1080 H.264 files in MPlayer.

First is to use the newly added VDPAU output. It allows the newer Nvidia video cards to decode the video without using much CPU. It is in SVN MPlayer (Nvidia binary driver 180.37 or newer required), you can find known bugs and report bugs HERE. (Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD only)
How to get the SVN version is described on the download page and snapshot tarballs are available as well.

Second is to use MPlayer with the experimental multithreaded FFmpeg-mt branch, which allows you to use multiple cores/CPU. (all OS and CPU supported)
To enable threading run mplayer -lavdopts threads=N file.mkv where N is the number of threads you want to use.
NOTE: FFmpeg-mt has problems with packed b-frames.

A Windows build of MPlayer using FFmpeg-mt can be found at http://oss.netfarm.it/mplayer-win32.php.

Third is to use the multithreaded CoreAVC codec with the CoreAVC-for-linux project. The CoreAVC decoder costs $15 USD. (Linux ONLY)(Windows users only need this PATCH)

Fourth, FFmpeg has added some optimizations from the x264 project. To fully utilize these you will need to make sure a recent version of YASM is installed and detected by the latest SVN MPlayer when compiling.

Fifth, using -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all:fast=1 may cause artifacts, but will allow you to play larger files in realtime. (all OS and CPU supported) (use -lavdopts skipframe=nonref:skiploopfilter=all:fast=1 for even more speedup, skipframe also works with VDPAU.)

There is also a rejected PATCH which adds support for the new multithreaded binary VC-1/WMV3 codec.