mpv/DOCS/xml/en/documentation.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
	"/usr/share/sgml/docbook/dtd/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"
[
<!ENTITY audio.xml		SYSTEM "audio.xml">
<!ENTITY bugreports.xml		SYSTEM "bugreports.xml">
<!ENTITY bugs.xml		SYSTEM "bugs.xml">
<!ENTITY cd-dvd.xml		SYSTEM "cd-dvd.xml">
<!ENTITY codecs.xml		SYSTEM "codecs.xml">
<!ENTITY edl.xml		SYSTEM "edl.xml">
<!ENTITY faq.xml		SYSTEM "faq.xml">
<!ENTITY features.xml		SYSTEM "features.xml">
<!ENTITY formats.xml		SYSTEM "formats.xml">
<!ENTITY history.xml		SYSTEM "history.xml">
<!ENTITY install.xml		SYSTEM "install.xml">
<!ENTITY mail-lists.xml		SYSTEM "mail-lists.xml">
<!ENTITY mencoder.xml		SYSTEM "mencoder.xml">
<!ENTITY patches.xml		SYSTEM "patches.xml">
<!ENTITY ports.xml		SYSTEM "ports.xml">
<!ENTITY skin.xml		SYSTEM "skin.xml">
<!ENTITY tvinput.xml		SYSTEM "tvinput.xml">
<!ENTITY usage.xml		SYSTEM "usage.xml">
<!ENTITY users-vs-dev.xml	SYSTEM "users-vs-dev.xml">
<!ENTITY video-filters.xml	SYSTEM "video-filters.xml">
<!ENTITY video.xml		SYSTEM "video.xml">
]>

<book lang="en">
<bookinfo id="toc">
<title>MPlayer - The Movie Player for LINUX</title>
<subtitle><ulink url="http://www.mplayerhq.hu"></ulink></subtitle>
<date>March 24, 2003</date>
<copyright>
  <year>2000</year>
  <year>2001</year>
  <year>2002</year>
  <year>2003</year>
  <holder>Arpad Gereoffy (A'rpi/ESP-team)</holder>
</copyright>
<!--
<legalnotice>
  <title>License</title>
  <para>This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
  Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
  option) any later version.</para>

  <para>This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
  WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
  or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
  for more details.</para>

  <para>You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
  Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA, 02111-1307, USA.</para>
</legalnotice>
-->
</bookinfo>


<preface id="howtoread">
<title>How to read this documentation</title>

<para>
If you are a first-time installer: be sure to read everything from here to
the end of the Installation section, and follow the links you will find. If
you have any other questions, return to the <link linkend="toc">Table of
Contents</link> and search for the topic, read the <xref linkend="faq"/>,
or try grepping through the files.
</para>

<para>
The main rule of this documentation: if it's not documented, it
<emphasis>does not exist.</emphasis> If I don't say you encode audio from
TV tuner, you can't.  A healthy quantity of combining ability is welcomed,
though.  Good luck. You'll need it :) And for another good advice, let me
quote Chris Phillips from the
<ulink url="http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/">mplayer-users</ulink>
mailing list:
</para>

<blockquote><para>
I said a while ago that there is such a difference between a newbie and a
dumbass. No matter what you actually know about a system (linux, cars,
girls :D) you should ALWAYS be able to take a step back and be objective,
otherwise, you're just dumb IMHO. A girl I live with assumed the vacuum
cleaner was broken because it didn't suck things up. never thought to
change the bag, because she'd never done it before... now that's just
stupid, not a case of simply not knowing what to do... Simply not being
that familiar with your surroundings is no excuse for a) laziness and b)
ignorance. So many people seem to see the word "error" and then stop...
few seem to actually read the words on the OTHER side of the colon.
</para></blockquote>
</preface>


<chapter id="intro">
<title>Introduction</title>

<para>
<application>MPlayer</application> is a movie player for Linux (runs on
many other Unices, and <emphasis role="bold">non-x86</emphasis> CPUs, see
<xref linkend="ports"/>). It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, OGG/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV,
QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by
many native, XAnim, RealPlayer, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch
<emphasis role="bold">VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, RealMedia</emphasis>, and
<emphasis role="bold">DivX</emphasis> movies too (and you don't need the avifile
library at all!). Another big 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 and SDL (and this way all their
drivers) and some lowlevel card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and
Radeon, Mach64, Permedia3) too! Most of them supports software or hardware
scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen.
<application>MPlayer</application> supports displaying through some
hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the <link linkend="dvb">DVB</link> and
<link linkend="dxr3">DXR3/Hollywood+</link>. And what about the nice big
antialiased shaded subtitles (<emphasis role="bold">10 supported types</emphasis>)
with European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic, Korean
fonts, and the onscreen display (OSD)?
</para>

<para>
The player is rock solid playing damaged MPEG files (useful for some VCDs),
and it plays bad AVI files which are unplayable with the famous windows
media player. Even AVI files without index chunk are playable, and you can
temporarily rebuild their indexes with the <option>-idx</option> option, or
permanently with <application>MEncoder</application>, thus enabling
seeking!  As you see, stability and quality are the most important things,
but the speed is also amazing.
</para>

<para>
<application>MEncoder</application> (MPlayer's Movie Encoder) is a simple movie
encoder, designed to encode MPlayer-playable movies
(<emphasis role="bold">AVI/ASF/OGG/DVD/VCD/VOB/MPG/MOV/VIV/FLI/RM/NUV/NET/PVA</emphasis>)
to other MPlayer-playable formats (see below). It can encode with various codecs,
like <emphasis role="bold">DivX4</emphasis> (1 or 2 passes), libavcodec,
<emphasis role="bold">PCM/MP3/VBR MP3</emphasis> audio. Also has powerful plugin
system for video manipulation.
</para>


<itemizedlist>
<title>MEncoder features</title>
<listitem><simpara>
  Encoding from the wide range of fileformats and decoders of
  <application>MPlayer</application>
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Encoding to all the codecs of ffmpeg's <link
  linkend="ffmpeg">libavcodec</link>
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Video encoding from <emphasis role="bold">V4L compatible TV tuners</emphasis>
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Encoding/multiplexing to interleaved AVI files with proper index
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Creating files from external audio stream
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  1, 2 or 3 pass encoding
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  <emphasis role="bold">VBR</emphasis> MP3 audio
  <important><simpara>
  VBR MP3 audio doesn't always play nicely on windows players!
  </simpara></important>
  </para></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  PCM audio
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Stream copying
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Input A/V synchronizing (PTS-based, can be disabled with
  <option>-mc 0</option> option)
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  FPS correction with <option>-ofps</option> option (useful when encoding
  29.97 fps VOB to 24 fps AVI)
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Using our very powerful plugin system (crop, expand, flip, postprocess,
  rotate, scale, rgb/yuv conversion)
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Can encode DVD/VOBsub <emphasis role="bold">AND</emphasis> text subtitles
  into the output file
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Can rip DVD subtitles to Vobsub format
  </simpara></listitem>
</itemizedlist>

<itemizedlist>
<title>Planned features</title>
<listitem><simpara>
  Even wider variety of available en/decoding formats/codecs
  (creating VOB files with DivX4/Indeo5/VIVO streams :).
  </simpara></listitem>
</itemizedlist>

<!-- FIXME: the license should be in bookinfo -->
<para>
<application>MPlayer</application> and <application>MEncoder</application>
can be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2.
</para>

&history.xml;
&install.xml;
</chapter>


&features.xml;
&usage.xml;
&faq.xml;
&cd-dvd.xml;
&ports.xml;
&mencoder.xml;
&mail-lists.xml;
&bugreports.xml;
&bugs.xml;
&skin.xml;
&users-vs-dev.xml;
&patches.xml;
</book>