MPlayer utilizes a complex playtree. It consists of global options written as first, for example mplayer -vfm 5 and options written after filenames, that apply only to the given filename/URL/whatever, for example: mplayer -vfm 5 movie1.avi movie2.avi -vfm 4 You can group filenames/URLs together using { and }. It's useful with option -loop: mplayer { 1.avi -loop 2 2.avi } -loop 3 The above command will play files in this order: 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2. Playing a file: mplayer [options] [path/]filename Playing more files: mplayer [default options] [path/]filename1 [options for filename1] filename2 [options for filename2] ... Playing VCD: mplayer [options] vcd://trackno [-cdrom-device /dev/cdrom] Playing DVD: mplayer [options] dvd://titleno [-dvd-device /dev/dvd] Playing from the WWW: mplayer [options] http://site.com/file.asf (playlists can be used, too) Playing from RTSP: mplayer [options] rtsp://server.example.com/streamName Examples: mplayer -vo x11 /mnt/Films/Contact/contact2.mpg mplayer vcd://2 -cdrom-device /dev/hdc mplayer -afm 3 /mnt/DVDtrailers/alien4.vob mplayer dvd://1 -dvd-device /dev/hdc mplayer -abs 65536 -delay -0.4 -nobps ~/movies/test.avi MPlayer has a fully configurable, command driven, control layer which lets you control MPlayer with keyboard, mouse, joystick or remote control (using LIRC). See the man page for the complete list of keyboard controls. MPlayer allows you bind any key/button to any MPlayer command using a simple config file. The syntax consist of a key name followed by a command. The default config file location is $HOME/.mplayer/input.conf but it can be overridden using the -input conf option (relative path are relative to $HOME/.mplayer). You can get a full list of supported key names by running mplayer -input keylist and a full list of available commands by running mplayer -input cmdlist. ## ## MPlayer input control file ## RIGHT seek +10 LEFT seek -10 - audio_delay 0.100 + audio_delay -0.100 q quit > pt_step 1 < pt_step -1 ENTER pt_step 1 1 Linux Infrared Remote Control - use an easy to build home-brewn IR-receiver, an (almost) arbitrary remote control and control your Linux box with it! More about it on the LIRC homepage. If you have the LIRC package installed, configure will autodetect it. If everything went fine, MPlayer will print "Setting up LIRC support..." on startup. If an error occurs it will tell you. If there is no message about LIRC there is no support compiled in. That's it :-) The application name for MPlayer is - surprise - mplayer. You can use any MPlayer commands and even pass more than one command by separating them with \n. Don't forget to enable the repeat flag in .lircrc when it makes sense (seek, volume, etc). Here's an excerpt from a sample .lircrc: begin button = VOLUME_PLUS prog = mplayer config = volume 1 repeat = 1 end begin button = VOLUME_MINUS prog = mplayer config = volume -1 repeat = 1 end begin button = CD_PLAY prog = mplayer config = pause end begin button = CD_STOP prog = mplayer config = seek 0 1\npause end If you don't like the standard location for the lirc-config file (~/.lircrc) use the -lircconf filename switch to specify another file. The slave mode allows you to build simple frontends to MPlayer. When run with the -slave option MPlayer will read commands separated by a newline (\n) from stdin. The commands are documented in the slave.txt file. MPlayer can play files from the network, using the HTTP, FTP, MMS or RTSP/RTP protocol. Playing works simply by passing the URL on the command line. MPlayer honors the http_proxy environment variable, using a proxy if available. Proxies can also be forced: mplayer http_proxy://proxy.micorsops.com:3128/http://micorsops.com:80/stream.asf MPlayer can read from stdin (not named pipes). This can for example be used to play from FTP: wget ftp://micorsops.com/something.avi -O - | mplayer - It's also recommended to enable -cache when playing from the network: wget ftp://micorsops.com/something.avi -O - | mplayer -cache 8192 - Remote streams allow you to access most MPlayer stream type from a remote host. The main purpose of this feature is to make it possible to directly use the CD or DVD drive of another computer on the network (provided you have the required bandwidth). On the downside some stream type (currently TV and MF) are not usable remotely because they are implemented at the demuxer level. It's sad for MF but TV stream would anyway require an insane amount of bandwidth. After having compiled MPlayer go to the TOOLS/netstream directory and enter make to build the server binary. You can then copy the netstream binary to the right place on your system (usually /usr/local/bin on Linux). First you have to start the server on the computer you intend to remotely access. Currently the server is very basic and doesn't have any commands line arguments so just enter netstream. Now you can for example play the second track of a VCD on the server with : mplayer -cache 5000 mpst://servername/vcd://2 You can also access files on this server : mplayer -cache 5000 mpst://servername//usr/local/movies/lol.avi Note that paths which aren't starting with a / will be relative to the directory where the server is running. The -cache option is not needed but highly recommended. Be aware that currently the server is not secure at all. So don't complain about the numerous exploits which are possible through this. Instead send some (good) patch to make it better or start writing your own server. The edit decision list (EDL) system allows you to automatically skip or mute sections of videos during playback, based on a movie specific EDL configuration file. This is useful for those who may want to watch a film in "family-friendly" mode. You can cut out any violence, profanity, Jar-Jar Binks .. from a movie according to your own personal preferences. Aside from this, there are other uses, like automatically skipping over commercials in video files you watch. The EDL file format is pretty bare-bones. Once the EDL system has reached a certain level of maturity, an XML-based file format will probably be implemented (keeping backwards compatibility with previous EDL formats). Include the -edl <filename> flag when you run MPlayer, with the name of the EDL file you want applied to the video. The current EDL file format is: [begin second] [end second] [action] Where the seconds are floating-point numbers and the action is either 0 for skip or 1 for mute. Example: 5.3 7.1 0 15 16.7 1 420 422 0 This will skip from second 5.3 to second 7.1 of the video, then mute at 15 seconds, unmute at 16.7 seconds and skip from second 420 to second 422 of the video. These actions will be performed when the playback timer reaches the times given in the file. To create an EDL file to work from, use the -edlout <filename> flag. During playback, when you want to mark the previous two seconds to skip over, hit i. A corresponding entry will be written to the file for that time. You can then go back and fine-tune the generated EDL file.