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 you will be guided through the compilation and configuration process of MPlayer. It's not easy, but it won't necessarily be hard. If you experience a behavior different from this description, please search through this documentation and you'll find your answers. binutils - recommended version is 2.11.x. gcc - recommended versions are 2.95 and 3.4+. 2.96 and 3.0.x are known to generate faulty code, 3.1 and 3.2 also had problems, 3.3 some minor ones. On PowerPC, use 4.x. Xorg/XFree86 - recommended version is 4.3 or later. Make sure the development packages are installed, too, otherwise it won't work. You don't absolutely need X, some video output drivers work without it. make - recommended version is 3.79.x or later. To build the XML documentation you need 3.80. FreeType - optional, required to have a font for the OSD and subtitles. At least 2.0.9 is required. libjpeg - optional JPEG en/decoder, required for the JPEG video output driver and decoding MJPEG video libpng - optional (M)PNG en/decoder, required for the GUI and the PNG video output driver lame - 3.90 or later is recommended, necessary for encoding MP3 audio with MEncoder. zlib - recommended, necessary for compressed MOV header and PNG support LIVE555 Streaming Media - optional, needed for some RTSP/RTP streams directfb - optional, use 0.9.13 or later. cdparanoia - optional, for CDDA support libxmms - optional, for XMMS input plugin support. At least 1.2.7 is required. libsmb - optional, for smb networking support ALSA - optional, for ALSA audio output support. At least 0.9.0rc4 is required. 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. 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. Example: mplayer -font 'Bitstream Vera Sans' anime.mkv To get a list of fonts known to fontconfig, use fc-list. 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 give the subtitles file the same name as your video file with a .utf extension 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 one of the following two commands to enable RTC for normal users: echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq sysctl dev/rtc/max-user-freq=1024 You can make this setting permanent by adding the latter to /etc/sysctl.conf. 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.