MPlayer

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This article is about the open source media player. For Microsoft's media player, mplayer2.exe, see the Windows Media Player article. For the online gaming community, see MPlayer.com.


MPlayer
MPlayer screenshot
Maintainer:	MPlayer team
Stable release:	1.0rc1 (October 22, 2006) _[+/-]
Preview release:	none (none) _[+/-]
OS:	Cross-platform
Use:	Media player
License:	GPL
Website:	www.mplayerhq.hu

MPlayer is a free and open source media player distributed under the GNU General Public License. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

MPlayer is known to support a wide variety of media formats. In addition to its wide range of supported formats MPlayer can also save all streamed content to a file.

A companion program, MEncoder, can take an input stream or file and transcode it into several different output formats, optionally applying various transforms along the way.

MPlayer is a command line application which has different optional GUIs for each of its supported operating systems. Commonly used GUIs are gmplayer (the default GUI for GNU/Linux and other Unix-like systems, and Microsoft Windows), MPlayer OS X (for Mac OS X), MPUI (for Windows) and WinMPLauncher (also for Windows). Several other GUI frontends are also available for each platform.

1 Development
2 Supported media formats
3 Legal issues
4 See also
5 External links
6 Notes

[edit] Development

Development of MPlayer began in 2000. The original author, Árpád Gereöffy (known as A'rpi / Astral in the demoscene), was soon joined by many other programmers. The project was started because A'rpi was unable to find any satisfactory video players for Linux. The first version was titled mpg12play v0.1 and was hacked together in a half hour using libmpeg3 from http://www.heroinewarrior.com/. After mpg12play v0.95pre5, the code was merged with an AVI player based on avifile's Win32 DLL loader to form MPlayer v0.3 in Nov of 2000 ^[1]. In the beginning most developers were from Hungary, but currently the developers are located worldwide. Alex Beregszászi has maintained MPlayer since 2003 when Árpád Gereöffy left MPlayer development to begin work on a second generation MPlayer. The MPlayer G2 project is currently paused for a number of reasons. ^[2]^{[citation needed]}

MPlayer was previously called "MPlayer - The Movie Player for Linux" by its developers but this was later shortened to "MPlayer - The Movie Player" after it was made available for multiple operating systems.

[edit] Supported media formats

Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs
Container formats: 3gp, AVI, ASF, FLV, Matroska, MOV (QuickTime), MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia
Video codecs: Cinepak, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV
Audio codecs: AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Intel Music Coder, MP3, RealAudio, Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA
Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, Sami, SRT, SubViewer, VOBsub, VPlayer

MPlayer also supports a variety of different output drivers for displaying video, including X11, OpenGL, DirectX, Quartz Compositor, VESA, SDL and rarer ones such as ASCII art and Blinkenlights. It can also be used to display TV from a TV card using the device tv://channel, or play and capture radio channels via radio://channel|frequency.

Since version 1.0RC1, decent built-in support for the ASS/SSA subtitle format is present by the use of libass.

[edit] Legal issues

Most video and audio codecs are supported natively through the libavcodec library of the FFmpeg project. For those codecs where no open source decoder has been implemented yet MPlayer relies on binary codecs. On x86 platforms it can use Windows DLLs directly with the help of a DLL loader forked from avifile (which itself forked its loader from the Wine project).

The combination of CSS decryption software and implementation of codecs covered by software patents places a fully-functional MPlayer in the legal bind shared by most open source multimedia players. In the past MPlayer used to include OpenDivX, a GPL-incompatible decoder library. This has since been removed, making MPlayer itself completely free software.