A quick installation guide can be found in the README file. Please read it first and then come back here for the rest of the gory details. In this section 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 IS worth it. You need a fairly recent system. On Linux, 2.4.x kernels are recommended. binutils - suggested version is 2.11.x. This program is responsible for generating MMX/ 3DNow!/etc instructions, thus very important. gcc - suggested versions are: 2.95.3 (maybe 2.95.4) and 3.2+. Never use 2.96 or 3.0.x! They generate faulty code for MPlayer. If you decide to change gcc from 2.96, then don't decide in favor of 3.x just because it's newer! Early releases of 3.x were even more buggy than 2.96. So downgrade to 2.95.x (downgrade libstdc++ too, other programs may need it) or don't up/downgrade at all (but in this case, be prepared for runtime problems). If you vote for 3.x, try to use the latest version, early releases had various bugs, so be sure you use at least 3.1, it's tested and working. XFree86 - suggested version is always the newest (4.3). Normally, everyone wants this, as starting with XFree86 4.0.2, it contains the XVideo extension (somewhere referred to as Xv) which is needed to enable the hardware YUV acceleration (fast image display) on cards that support it. Make sure its development package is installed, too, otherwise it won't work. For some video cards you don't need XFree86. See list below. make - suggested version is always the newest (at least 3.79.x). This usually isn't important. FreeType 2.0.9 or later is required to have a font for the OSD and subtitles. SDL - it's not mandatory, but can help in some cases (bad audio, video cards that lag strangely with the xv driver). Always use the newest (beginning from 1.2.x). libjpeg - optional JPEG decoder, used by the -mf option and some QT MOV files. Useful for both MPlayer and MEncoder if you plan to work with jpeg files. libpng - recommended and default (M)PNG decoder. Required for GUI. Useful for both MPlayer and MEncoder. lame - recommended, needed for encoding MP3 audio with MEncoder, suggested version is always the newest (at least 3.90). zlib - recommended, necessary for compressed MOV header and PNG support. libogg - optional, needed for playing OGG file format. libvorbis - optional, needed for playing OGG Vorbis audio. LIVE555 Streaming Media - optional, needed for playing RTSP/RTP streams. directfb - optional, from . At least 0.9.13 is required. cdparanoia - optional, for CDDA support libxmms - optional, for XMMS input plugin support. At least 1.2.7 is required. libsmb - optional, for Samba support. ALSA - optional, for ALSA audio output support. At least 0.9.0rc4 is required. bio2jack - optional, for JACK audio output support, needed only in compile time. You can obtain it from http://bio2jack.sf.net. Since it doesn't have install option you have to manually put the file libbio2jack.a somewhere in your library path (e.g. /usr/local/lib) or use the --with-bio2jack=DIR switch to tell ./configure where that file is. 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. 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 is nice and very fast. Matrox G200/G400/G450/G550 cards: although a Vidix driver is provided, it is recommended to use the mga_vid module instead, for it works much better. Please see the mga_vid section about its installation and usage. It is important to do these steps before compiling MPlayer, otherwise no mga_vid support will be built. Also check out the Matrox TV-out section. If you don't use Linux, your only possibility is the VIDIX driver: read the VIDIX section. 3Dfx Voodoo3/Banshee cards: please see tdfxfb section in order to gain big speedup. It is important to do these steps before compiling MPlayer, otherwise no 3Dfx support will be built. If you use X, use at least 4.2.0, as 3dfx Xv driver was broken in 4.1.0, and earlier releases. ATI cards: VIDIX driver is provided for the following cards: Radeon, Rage128, Mach64 (Rage XL/Mobility, Xpert98). Also see the ATI cards section of the TV-out documentation, to know if you card's TV-out is supported under Linux/MPlayer. S3 cards: the Savage and Virge/DX chips have hardware acceleration. Use as new XFree86 version as possible, older drivers are buggy. Savage chips have problems with YV12 display, see S3 Xv section for details. Older, Trio cards have no, or slow hardware support. nVidia cards: may or may not be good choice for video playing. If you do not have a GeForce2 (or newer) card, it's not likely to work without bugs. the built-in nVidia driver in XFree86 does not support hardware YUV acceleration on all nVidia cards. You have to download nVidia's closed-source drivers from nVidia.com. See the nVidia Xv driver section for details. Please also check the nVidia TV-out section if you wish to use a TV. 3DLabs GLINT R3 and Permedia3: a VIDIX driver is provided (pm3_vid). Please see the VIDIX section for details. Other cards: none of the above? Try if the XFree86 driver (and your card) supports hardware acceleration. See the Xv section for details. If it doesn't, then your card's video features aren't supported under your operating system :( If hardware scaling works under Windows, it doesn't mean it will work under Linux or other operating system, it depends on the drivers. Most manufacturers neither make Linux drivers nor release specifications of their chips - so you are unlucky if using their cards. See . Fullscreen playing can be achieved by either enabling software scaling (use the -zoom or -vf option, but I warn you: this is slow), or switching to a smaller video mode, for example 352x288. If you don't have YUV acceleration, this latter method is recommended. Video mode switching can be enabled by using the -vm option and it works with the following drivers: using XFree86: see details in DGA driver and X11 driver sections. DGA is recommended! Also try DGA via SDL, sometimes it's better. not using XFree86: try the drivers in the following order: vesa, fbdev, svgalib, aalib. GD 7548: present on-board and tested in Compaq Armada 41xx notebook series. XFree86 3: works in 8/16bpp modes. However, the driver is dramatically slow and buggy in 800x600@16bpp. Recommended: 640x480@16bpp XFree86 4: the Xserver freezes soon after start unless acceleration is disabled, but then the whole thing gets slower than XFree86 3. No XVideo. FBdev: framebuffer can be turned on with the clgenfb driver in the kernel, though for me it worked only in 8bpp, thus unusable. The clgenfb source had to be extended with the 7548 ID before compilation. VESA: the card is only VBE 1.2 capable, so VESA output can't be used. Can't be workarounded with UniVBE. SVGAlib: detects an older Cirrus chip. Usable but slow with -bpp 8. Soundblaster Live!: with this card you can use 4 or 6 (5.1) channels AC3 decoding instead of 2. Read the Software AC3 decoding section. For hardware AC3 passthrough you must use ALSA 0.9 with OSS emulation! C-Media with S/PDIF out: hardware AC3 passthrough is possible with these cards, see Hardware AC3 decoding section. Features of other cards aren't supported by MPlayer. It's very recommended to read the sound card section! Decide if you need GUI. If you do, see the GUI section before compiling. If you want to install MEncoder (our great all-purpose encoder), see the MEncoder section. If you have a V4L compatible TV tuner card, and wish to watch/grab and encode movies with MPlayer, read the TV input section. If you have a V4L compatible radio tuner card, and wish to listen and capture sound with MPlayer, read the radio section. There is a neat OSD Menu support ready to be used. Check the OSD menu section. 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 is needed only when you want to change its properties, as the main binary contains an internal copy of it. Check if you have codecs.conf in your home directory (~/.mplayer/codecs.conf) left from old MPlayer versions, and remove it. Note that if you have a codecs.conf in ~/.mplayer/, the builtin and system codecs.conf will be ignored completely. Do not do this unless you want to fiddle with MPlayer internals as this can can cause many problems. If you want to change the codecs search order, use the -vc, -ac, -vfm, or -afm options either on the command line or in your config file (see the manual page). 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. The recommended method is installing a TTF font file and telling MPlayer to use it. See the Subtitles and OSD section for details. The GUI needs GTK 1.2.x or GTK 2.0 (it isn't fully GTK, but the panels are). The skins are stored in PNG format, so GTK, libpng (and their devel stuff, usually called gtk-dev and libpng-dev) has to be installed. You can build it by specifying --enable-gui during ./configure. Then, to turn on GUI mode, you have to execute the gmplayer binary. Currently you can't use the -gui option on the command line, due to technical reasons. 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/skins), or to $HOME/.mplayer/skins. 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 */skins/newskin directory. You need to tell MPlayer which font to use to enjoy OSD and subtitles. Any TrueType font or special bitmap fonts will work. However, TrueType fonts are recommended as they look far better, can be properly scaled to the movie size and cope better with different encodings. There are two ways to get TrueType fonts to work. The first is to pass the -font option to specify a TrueType font file on the command line. This option will be a good candidate to put in your configuration file (see the manual page for details). The second is to create a symlink called subfont.ttf to the font file of your choice. Either ln -s /path/to/sample_font.ttf ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf for each user individually or a system-wide one: ln -s /path/to/sample_font.ttf $PREFIX/share/mplayer/subfont.ttf If MPlayer was compiled with fontconfig support, the above methods won't work, instead -font expects a fontconfig font name and defaults to the sans-serif font. To get a list of fonts known to fontconfig, use fc-list. Example: mplayer -font 'Bitstream Vera Sans' anime.mkv If for some reason you wish or need to employ bitmap fonts, download a set from our homepage. You can choose between various ISO fonts and some sets of fonts contributed by users in various encodings. Uncompress the file you downloaded to ~/.mplayer or $PREFIX/share/mplayer. Then rename or symlink one of the extracted directories to font, for example: ln -s ~/.mplayer/arial-24 ~/.mplayer/font ln -s $PREFIX/share/mplayer/arial-24 $PREFIX/share/mplayer/font Fonts should have an appropriate font.desc file which maps unicode font positions to the actual code page of the subtitle text. Another solution is to have UTF-8-encoded subtitles and use the -utf8 option or just name the subtitles file <video_name>.utf and have it in the same directory as the video file. MPlayer has a completely user definiable OSD Menu interface. the Preferences menu is currently UNIMPLEMENTED! compile MPlayer by passing the --enable-menu to ./configure make sure you have an OSD font installed copy etc/menu.conf to your .mplayer directory copy etc/input.conf to your .mplayer directory, or to the system-wide MPlayer config dir (default: /usr/local/etc/mplayer) check and edit input.conf to enable menu movement keys (it is described there). start MPlayer by the following example: $ mplayer -menu file.avi push any menu key you defined There are three timing methods in MPlayer. To use the old method, you don't have to do anything. It uses usleep() to tune A/V sync, with +/- 10ms accuracy. However sometimes the sync has to be tuned even finer. The new timer code uses the RTC (RealTime Clock) for this task, because it has precise 1ms timers. The -rtc option enables it, but a properly set up kernel is required. If you are running kernel 2.4.19pre8 or later you can adjust the maximum RTC frequency for normal users through the /proc filesystem. Use this command to enable RTC for normal users: echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq You can see the new timer's efficiency in the status line. The power management functions of some notebook BIOSes with speedstep CPUs interact badly with RTC. Audio and video may get out of sync. Plugging the external power connector in before you power up your notebook seems to help. In some hardware combinations (confirmed during usage of non-DMA DVD drive on an ALi1541 board) usage of the RTC timer causes skippy playback. It's recommended to use the third method in these cases. The third timer code is turned on with the -softsleep option. It has the efficiency of the RTC, but it doesn't use RTC. On the other hand, it requires more CPU.