MPlayer - The Movie Player for LINUX

© 2000-2002 Arpad Gereoffy (A'rpi/ESP-team)
http://www.mplayerhq.hu

[ English ] [ Hungarian ] [ German ] [ French ] [ Polish ] [ Italian ]

Table of Contents

0. How to read this documentation

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 Table of Contents and search for the topic, read the FAQ, or try grepping through the files.

The main rule of this documentation: if it's not documented, it does not exist. 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 mplayer-users mailing list:

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, becasue 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.

1. Introduction

MPlayer is a movie player for LINUX (runs on many other Unices, and non-x86 CPUs, see the ports section). It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, OGG, VIVO, ASF/WMV, QT/MOV, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ files, supported by many native, XAnim, RealPlayer, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, RealMedia, and DivX 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. MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the DVB and DXR3/Hollywood+. And what about the nice big antialiased shaded subtitles (10 supported types) with European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic, Korean fonts, and the onscreen display (OSD)?

MPlayer is under GPL v2 license.

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 -idx option, or permanently with MEncoder, thus enabling seeking! As you see, stability and quality are the most important things, but the speed is also amazing.

1.1 History

This began a year ago... I (A'rpi) have tried lots of players under linux (mtv,xmps,dvdview,livid/oms,videolan, xine,xanim,avifile,xmmp) but they all have some problem. Mostly with special files or with audio/video sync. Most of them is unable to play both MPEG1, MPEG2 and AVI (DivX) files. Many players have image quality or speed problems too. So I've decided to write/modify one...

1.2 Installation

In this chapter I'll try to guide you through the compiling and configuring process of MPlayer. It's not easy, but it won't necessarily be hard. If you experience a different behavior than what I explain, please search through this documentation and you'll find your answers. If you see links, please follow them and read carefully what they contain. It will take some time, but it DOES worth it.

You need a fairly recent system. On Linux, 2.4.x kernels are recommended.

Software requirements:

Codecs:

Video Cards

There are generally two kind of video cards. One kind (the newer cards) has hardware scaling and YUV acceleration support, the other cards don't.

YUV cards

They can display and scale (zoom) the picture to any size that fits in their memory, with small CPU usage (even when zooming), thus fullscreen playing is nice and very fast.

Non-YUV cards

Fullscreen playing can be achieved by either enabling software scaling (use the -zoom or -vop scale option, but I warn you: this is slow), or switching to a small resolution video mode, for example 352x288. If you don't have YUV acceleration, the latter method is recommended. Video mode switching can be enabled by using the -vm option and it works with the following drivers:

Some cards:

Sound cards:

Features:

Then build MPlayer:

    ./configure
    make
    make install

At this point, MPlayer is ready to use. The directory $PREFIX/share/mplayer contains the codecs.conf file, which is used to tell the program all the codecs and their capabilities. This file should always be kept up to date together with the main binary.
Check if you have codecs.conf in your home directory (~/.mplayer/codecs.conf) left from old MPlayer versions, and remove it.

Debian users can build a .deb package for themselves, it's very simple. Just exec fakeroot debian/rules binary in MPlayer's root directory. See Debian packaging for detailed instructions.

Always browse the output of ./configure, and the configure.log file, they contain information about what will be built, and what will not. You may also want to view config.h and config.mak files.
If you have some libraries installed, but not detected by ./configure, then check if you also have the proper header files (usually the -dev packages) and their version matches. The configure.log file usually tells you what is missing.

Though not mandatory, the fonts should be installed in order to gain OSD, and subtitle functionality. Download mp-arial-iso-8859-*.zip and/or optional (if exists) language updates. See the Subtitles and OSD section for details.

    mkdir ~/.mplayer/font
    cd ~/.mplayer/font
    unzip mp-arial-iso-8859-1.zip
    ln -s ~/.mplayer/font/arial-24 font

1.3 What about the GUI?

The GUI needs GTK (it isn't GTK, but the panels are). The skins are stored in PNG format, so gtk, libpng (and their devel stuff) has to be installed. You can build it by specifying --enable-gui during ./configure. Then, to turn on GUI mode, you either

Hint
Press the middle button (on 2 button mice press left and right simultaneously) to open a GTK menu with a DVD playing option.

As MPlayer doesn't have a skin included, you have to download them if you want to use the GUI. See the download page. They should be extracted to the usual system-wide directory ($PREFIX/share/mplayer/Skin), or to $HOME/.mplayer/Skin. MPlayer by default looks in these directories for a directory named default, but you can use the -skin newskin option, or the skin=newskin config file directive to use the skin in */Skin/newskin directory.

1.4 Subtitles and OSD

MPlayer can display subtitles along with movie files. Currently the following formats are supported:

The command line options differ slightly for the different formats:

VobSub subtitles

VobSub subtitles consist of a big (some megabytes) .SUB file, and optional .IDX and/or .IFO files.
Usage: if you have files like sample.sub, sample.ifo, sample.idx - you have to pass the -vobsub sample -vobsubid <id> options (optionally with pathname, of course). The -vobsubid option is like -sid for DVDs, you can choose between subtitle tracks (languages) with it.

Other subtitles

The other formats consist of a single text file containing timing, placement and text information.
Usage: if you have a file like sample.txt, you have to pass the option -sub sample.txt (optionally with pathname, of course).

Adjusting subtitle timing and placement:

-subdelay <sec>
Delays subtitles by <sec> seconds. Can be negative.
-subfps <rate>
Specify frame/sec rate of subtitle file (float number)
-subpos <0 - 100>
Specify the position of subtitles.

If you experience a growing delay between the movie and the subtitles when using a MicroDVD subtitle file, most likely the frame rate of the movie and the subtitle file are different.
Please note that the MicroDVD subtitle format uses absolute frame numbers for its timing, and therefore the -subfps option cannot be used with this format. As MPlayer has no way to guess the frame rate of the subtitle file, you have to manually convert the frame rate. There is a little perl script in the contrib directory of the MPlayer FTP site to do this conversion for you.

About DVD subtitles, read the DVD section.

1.4.1 MPlayer's own subtitle format (MPsub)

MPlayer introduces a new subtitle format called MPsub. It was designed by me (Gabucino). Basically its main feature is being dynamically time-based (although it has frame-based mode too). Example (from DOCS/tech/mpsub.sub):

# first number : wait this much after previous subtitle disappeared
# second number : display the current subtitle for this many seconds

15 3
A long long, time ago...

0 3
in a galaxy far away...

0 3
Naboo was under an attack.

So you see, the main goal was to make subtitle editing/timing/joining/cutting easy. And, if you - say - get an SSA subtitle but it's badly timed/delayed to your version of the movie, you simply do a mplayer dummy.avi -sub source.ssa -dumpmpsub. A dump.mpsub file will be created in the current directory, which will contain the source subtitle's text, but in MPsub format. Then you can freely add/subtract seconds to/from the subtitle.

Subtitles are displayed with a technique called 'OSD', On Screen Display. OSD is used to display current time, volume bar, seek bar etc.

1.4.2 Installing OSD and subtitles

You need an MPlayer font package to be able to use OSD/SUB feature. There are many ways to get it:

After that, UNZIP the file you downloaded to ~/.mplayer or $PREFIX/share/mplayer. Then rename or symlink one of them to font (like: ln -s ~/.mplayer/arial-24 ~/.mplayer/font). Now you have to see a timer at the upper left corner of the movie (switch it off with the "o" key).

OSD has 3 states: (switch with 'o')

You can change default behaviour by setting osdlevel= variable in config file.

1.5 RTC

There are three timing methods in MPlayer. Note: NEVER install a setuid root MPlayer binary on a multiuser system! It's a clear way for everyone to become root.

2. Features

2.1 Supported formats

2.2 Supported codecs

2.3 Video & Audio output devices

2.4 MEncoder - An All-Purpose Encoder

2.5 TV input

This section is about how to enable watching/grabbing from V4L compatible TV tuner.

THIS CODE IS CURRENTLY NOT BEING WORKED ON! Do not expect it to work without tweaking/experimenting!

2.5.1 Compilation

  1. First, you have to recompile. ./configure will autodetect kernel headers of v4l stuff and the existence of /dev/video* entries. If they exist, TV support will be built (see the output of ./configure).
  2. Make sure your tuner works with another TV software in Linux, for example xawtv.
Hint
Are the colors messed up? Then your tuner cannot display in YV12 colorspace. Try I420 (-vc rawi420) or YUY2, UYVY, RGB32 (-vo sdl) colorspaces. You can specify these with the outfmt=YV12 option, see below.

2.5.2 Available options

on
Use TV input.
noaudio
No sound, thanks.
driver
dummy - NULL TV input :) Used for testing only, generates dummy input.
v4l - Captures images from standard V4L interface (default /dev/video0).
device
Specify a device other than the default /dev/video0.
input
Specify from which input of the TV tuner you wish to grab (e.g. television, s-video, composite, ...)
Prints the available ones during init.
freq
Specify the frequency to set the tuner to (e.g. 511.250).
outfmt
Specify the output format the tuner should use to transport images to us (rgb32, rgb24, yv12, uyvy, i420 (for i420 you have to pass the -vc rawi420 option, because of a fourcc conflict)).
width
width of the output window in pixels
height
height of the output window in pixels
norm
available: PAL, SECAM, NTSC
channel
Set the tuner to the given channel.
chanlist
available: us-bcast, us-cable, europe-west, europe-east, etc

2.5.3 Keyboard control

  h / k  select previous/next channel
nchange norm
bchange channel list

2.5.4 Examples

Dummy output, to AAlib :)
    mplayer -tv on:driver=dummy:width=640:height=480 -vo aa

Input from standard V4L
    mplayer -tv on:driver=v4l:width=640:height=480:outfmt=i420 -vc rawi420 -vo xv

Note:
If you have a TV card with an external audio device and get only a black screen, although input works with xawtv or similar, then try to use the -noaudio option. For the example above this would be:
    mplayer -tv on:noaudio:driver=v4l:width=640:height=480:outfmt=i420 -vc rawi420 -vo xv

3. Usage

3.1 Command line

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 will play files in this order: 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 2

  file  mplayer [options] [path/]filename
filesmplayer [default options] [path/]filename1 [options for filename1] filename2 [options for filename2] ...
VCDmplayer [options] -vcd trackno [-cdrom-device /dev/cdrom]
DVDmplayer [options] -dvd titleno [-dvd-device /dev/dvd]
netmplayer [options] http://site.com/file.asf (playlists can be used too)

Latest versions of MPlayer also accepts VCD and DVD tracks in URL style, just like Xine does: mplayer dvd://1 or mplayer vcd://1

  mplayer -vo x11 /mnt/Films/Contact/contact2.mpg
  mplayer -vcd 2
  mplayer -afm 3 /mnt/DVDtrailers/alien4.vob
  mplayer -dvd 1 -dvd-device /dev/hdc
  mplayer -abs 65536 -delay -0.4 -nobps ~/movies/test.avi

3.2 Control

MPlayer has a fully configurable, command driven, control layer which lets you control MPlayer with keyboard, mouse, joystick or remote control (using LIRC).

3.2.1 Default controls

Keyboard controls from terminal:

  <- or ->  seek backward/forward 10 seconds
up or downseek backward/forward 1 minute
pgup/pgdownseek backward/forward 10 minutes
< or >seek backward/forward in playlist
p or SPACEpause movie (press any key)
q or ESCstop playing and quit program
+ or -adjust audio delay by +/- 0.1 second
/ or *decrease/increase volume
ftoggle fullscreen
otoggle OSD: none / seek / seek+timer
z or xadjust subtitle delay by +/- 0.1 second
r or tadjust subtitle position
HOME or ENDgo to next/previous playtree entry in the parent list
INSERT or DELETEgo to next/previous alternative source (only available in asx playlist)

(the following keys are valid only when using -vo xv)

1 or 2adjust contrast
3 or 4adjust brightness
5 or 6adjust hue
7 or 8adjust saturation

GUI keyboard controls:

  , and .  previous / next file
gray - or +decrease / increase volume
enterstart playing
spacepause
sstop
aabout
lload file
bskin browser
etoggle equalizer
ptoggle playlist
ftoggle fullscreen
mtoggle mute

Keyboard controls for TV input:

  h or l  select previous/next channel
nchange norm
bchange channel list

3.2.2 Controls configuration

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 switch (relative path are relative to $HOME/.mplayer).

Example:

##
## 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

3.2.2.1 Key names

You can have a full list by running mplayer -input keylist

Keyboard:

Mouse (only supported under X):

Joystick (support must be enabled at compile time):

3.2.2.2 Commands

You can have a full list of known commands by running "mplayer -input cmdlist"

3.2.3 Control from LIRC

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 at www.lirc.org.

If you have installed the lirc-package, configure will autodetect it. If everything went fine, MPlayer will print a message like "Setting up lirc support..." on startup. If an error occurs it will tell you. If it doesn't tell you anything about LIRC there's no support compiled in. That's it :-)

The application name for MPlayer is - oh wonder - '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 make sense (seek, volume, etc). Here's an excerpt from my .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.

3.2.4 Slave mode

The slave mode allow you to build simple frontend to MPlayer. When enabled (with the -slave switch) MPlayer will read commands separated by new line (\n) from stdin.

3.3 Streaming from network or pipes

MPlayer can play files from network, using the HTTP or MMS protocol.

Playing goes by simply using adding the URL to the command line. MPlayer also honors the http_proxy environment variable, and uses proxy if available. Proxy usage 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 be for example used to play from FTP:

  wget ftp://micorsops.com/something.avi -O - | mplayer -

Note: it's also recommended to enable CACHE when playback from network:

  wget ftp://micorsops.com/something.avi -O - | mplayer -cache 8192 -

4. FAQ section

5. CD/DVD section

6. Ports

6.1 Debian packaging

To build the package, get the cvs version, or .tgz and uncompress it, and cd into programs directory:

    cd main
    fakeroot debian/rules binary

(... mplayer detects hardware/software, builds itself and.. ) dpkg-deb: building package `mplayer' in `../mplayer_0.90-1_i386.deb'.

And now just become root, and:

    dpkg -i ../mplayer_0.90-1_i386.deb as root.

Here's how it looks like:

	eyck@incubus:/src/main$ sudo dpkg -i ../mplayer_0.90-1_i386.deb
	Password:
	(Reading database ... 26946 files and directories currently installed.)
	Preparing to replace mplayer 0.50-1 (using ../mplayer_0.90-1_i386.deb)
	Unpacking replacement mplayer ...
	Setting up mplayer (0.90-1) ...

6.2 FreeBSD

To build the package you will need GNU make (gmake, /usr/ports/devel/gmake), native BSD make will not work.

To run MPlayer you will need to re-compile the kernel with "options USER_LDT" (unless you are running -CURRENT, where this is default). If you have a CPU with SSE also use "options CPU_ENABLE_SSE" to use it (FreeBSD-STABLE required, or use kernel patches).

If MPlayer complains about "CD-ROM Device '/dev/cdrom' not found!" make a symbolic link: ln -s /dev/(your_cdrom_device) /dev/cdrom

There's no DVD support for FreeBSD yet.

6.3 Solaris

MPlayer should work on Solaris 2.6 or newer.

AVI file playback works best on Solaris x86, because you have the option to use the win32 codecs on the x86 platform, or can use MMX/MMX2/3DNow/etc instructions for MP3/DivX/DVD/whatever. On Colaris SPARC, you'll find quite a few AVI files with non working video and/or audio playback, because the video/audio codecs using the Win32 DLLs are not available. However, DivX/OpenDivX movies should work, when using libavcodec.

On UltraSPARCs, MPlayer takes advantage of their VIS extensions (equivalent to MMX), currently only in libmpeg2, libvo and libavcodec, but not in mp3lib. You can watch a VOB file on a 400MHz CPU. You'll need mLib installed.

To build the package you will need GNU make (gmake, /opt/sfw/gmake), native Solaris make will not work. Typical error you get when building with Solaris' make instead of GNU make:

   % /usr/ccs/bin/make
   make: Fatal error in reader: Makefile, line 25: Unexpected end of line seen

On Solaris SPARC, you need the GNU C/C++ Compiler; it does not matter if GNU C/C++ compiler is configured with or without the GNU assembler.

On Solaris x86, you need the GNU assembler and the GNU C/C++ compiler, configured to use the GNU assembler! The mplayer code on the x86 platform makes heavy use of MMX, SSE and 3DNOW! instructions that cannot be compiled using Sun's assembler /usr/ccs/bin/as.

The configure script tries to find out, which assembler program is used by your "gcc" command (in case the autodetection fails, use the --as=/whereever/you/have/installed/gnu-as option to tell the configure script where it can find GNU "as" on your system).

Error message from configure on a Solaris x86 system using GCC without GNU assembler:

   % configure
   ...
   Checking assembler (/usr/ccs/bin/as) ... , failed
   Please upgrade(downgrade) binutils to 2.10.1...

(Solution: Install and use a gcc configured with "--with-as=gas")

Typical error you get when building with a GNU C compiler that does not use GNU as:

   % gmake
   ...
   gcc -c -Iloader -Ilibvo -O4 -march=i686 -mcpu=i686 -pipe -ffast-math
	-fomit-frame-pointer  -I/usr/local/include   -o mplayer.o mplayer.c
   Assembler: mplayer.c
   "(stdin)", line 3567 : Illegal mnemonic
   "(stdin)", line 3567 : Syntax error
   ... more "Illegal mnemonic" and "Syntax error" errors ...

For DVD support you must have the patched libcss installed. Patch: http://www.tools.de/solaris/mplayer/.

Due to two bugs in Solaris 8 x86, you cannot reliably play DVD discs larger than 4 GB:

On Solaris with an UltraSPARC CPU, you can get some extra speed by using the CPU's VIS instructions for certain time consuming operations. VIS acceleration can be used in MPlayer by calling functions in Sun's mediaLib.

VIS accelerated operations from mediaLib are used for mpeg2 video decoding and for color space conversion in the video output drivers.

6.4 StrongARM

MPlayer is reported to compile on StrongARM. Use the following command line:

  ./configure --target=arm-linux --disable-css --with-x11libdir=/usr/arm/lib
	      --with-x11incdir=/usr/arm/lib --disable-gcc-checking

6.5 Silicon Graphics / IRIX

Reported working. You'll probably have to use the SGI ao driver. Anyone has closer info?

6.6 QNX

Works. You'll need to download SDL for QNX, and install it. Then run MPlayer with -vo sdl:photon and -ao sdl:nto options, and it should be fast.

The -vo x11 output will be even slower than on Linux, since QNX has only X emulation which is VERY slow. Use SDL.

6.7 OpenBSD

To build the package you will need GNU make (gmake, /usr/ports/devel/gmake), native BSD make will not work, and a recent binutils (including objcopy).

Due to limitations in different versions of gas (relocation vs mmx), you'll need to compile in two steps: First make sure that the non-native as is first in PATH and do a 'gmake -k', then make sure that the native version is used and do 'gmake'.

To use Win32 DLLs with MPlayer you will need to re-compile the kernel with "option USER_LDT".

If MPlayer complains about not finding '/dev/cdrom' or '/dev/dvd' make a symbolic link, e.g. ln -s /dev/rcd0c /dev/dvd

The not so hardcore hackers amongst us might want to use the ports version (/usr/ports/x11/mplayer).

6.8. Cygwin

You will have to go to the MPlayer directory, and copy or symlink etc/cygwin_inttypes.h to /usr/include/inttypes.h to make MPlayer compile. Otherwise it will complain about missing intypes.h.

Appendix A - Authors

Important
Do not send bug reports, help & feature requests directly to the authors!

Read Appendix C and subscribe to mplayer-users mailing lists.

The MPlayer project:

Main testers:

The codecs, libs:

Their code is not used in current player version, but I've got some ideas or other technical help from:

Appendix A2 - MPlayer code and documentation maintainers

Homepage

English documentation

Documentation translations

Platforms/ports

MPlayer code:

libvo drivers:

VIDIX drivers:

libao2 drivers:

TOOLS:

Appendix B - Mailing lists

There are some public mailing lists on MPlayer. Subscribing can be achieved on the following addresses:

Note: Unless explicitly stated otherwise the language of the above lists is English. Please do not send messages in other languages!

Note: You can reach the searchable mailing list archives at http://www.mplayerhq.hu/cgi-bin/htsearch.

Appendix C - How to report bugs

Appendix D - Known bugs

Special system/CPU-specific bugs/problems:

Various A-V sync and other audio problems:

General audio delay or jerky sound (exists with all or many files): Audio delay/de-sync specific to one or a few files: No sound at all: No picture at all (just plain grey/green window):

Video-out problems:

First note: options -fs -vm and -zoom are just recommendations, not (yet) supported by all drivers. So it isn't a bug if it doesn't work. Only a few driver supports scaling/zooming, don't expect this from x11 or dga.

OSD/sub flickering:
- x11 driver: sorry, it can't be fixed now
- xv driver: use -double option

Green image using mga_vid (-vo mga / -vo xmga):
- mga_vid misdetected your card's RAM amount, reload it using mga_ram_size option