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MPlayer has set itself apart as a versatile movie player under Linux and other platforms. Whether you love or hate it, once you try it, you'll have to agree that it is very different, with its versatile keyboard control and alternative methods for handling video playback. MPlayer grabs external formats and hacks into them to make them playable under other operating systems than they were designed for. It plays back encrypted DVDs and broken media files, and can encode media files. The best way to install MPlayer is by compiling it from source code. Though pre-compiled binary packages (.deb and .rpm) are available, a source-based installation gives you a fully customised player, optimised for maximum performance in terms of your system's processor type, video drivers, and other features.
To install MPlayer from source code, download the code tarball. Extract the files into a temporary directory. Change to the directory into which you downloaded the files and enter the following commands: ./configure --enable-gui
make
su (if you're not already root)
make install
Without the --enable-gui switch, you'll get a command-line-based player. Even with it, at this point, you have only has command-line capabilities, as there are no skins for MPlayer to use. Visit the MPlayer download page, grab a skins, extract it, and copy it into the directory /usr/local/share/mplayer/Skin. Make sure you copy the whole directory though, not just the files within. You should now have a 90% functioning player which can play video files with no worries, but still lacks subtitles for DVD playback. Grab a subtitle pack from the download page and extract it. You'll find that there are a few choices for subtitle size. For most people, I recommend font size 14. Copy the directory containing your choice of font size to /usr/local/share/mplayer/font and you should be good to go. Unfortunately, MPlayer lacks DVD menus, meaning that you have to manually choose title numbers, chapters, and audio streams. Those who are put off by an application with no menus can try out the xine multimedia player. It has full surround sound options, options to change video filters, audio streams, subtitles, and more, all on the fly, with a fairly mature code base. For those of you chasing a more lightweight player, designed for just DVDs, I recommend Ogle, which is rapidly gaining popularity. |
