Welcome to MPlayer, the Unix movie player. MPlayer can play most standard video formats out of the box and almost all others with the help of external codecs. MPlayer currently works best from the command line, but visual feedback for many functions is available from its onscreen status display (OSD), which is also used for displaying subtitles. A GUI with skin support is in the alpha development stage, but not completely finished yet. This document is for getting you started in a few minutes. It cannot answer all of your questions. If you have problems, please read the documentation in DOCS/documentation.html, which should help you solve most of your problems. Also read the man page to learn how to use MPlayer. Requirements: - To compile MPlayer with X11 support, you need to have the XFree86 development packages installed. - For the GUI you need the libpng and GTK 1.2 development packages. Before you start... Unless you know what are you doing, consult DOCS/video.html to see which driver to use with your video card to get the best quality and performance. Most cards require special drivers not included with XFree86 to drive their 2-D video acceleration features like YUV and scaling. A quick and incomplete list of recommendations: - ATI cards: Get the GATOS drivers for X11/Xv or use VIDIX. - Matrox G200/G4x0/G550: Compile and use mga_vid for Linux, on BSD use VIDIX. - 3dfx Voodoo3/Banshee: Get XFree86 4.2.0+ for Xv or use the tdfxfb driver. - nVidia cards: Get the X11 driver from www.nvidia.com for Xv support. - NeoMagic cards: Get an Xv capable driver from our homepage as described in DOCS/video.html. Without accelerated video even an 800MHz P3 may be too slow to play DVDs. ______________________ STEP0: Getting MPlayer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Official releases, prereleases and CVS snapshots, as well as fonts for the OSD, Win32 codecs and a number of different skins for the GUI are available from the download section of our homepage at http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/dload.html A set of fonts is necessary for the OSD and subtitles, the GUI needs at least one skin and Win32 codecs add support for some more video and audio formats. MPlayer does not come with any of these by default, you have to download and install them separately. MPlayer is also available via anonymous CVS. Issue the following commands to get the latest sources: cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@mplayerhq.hu:/cvsroot/mplayer login cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@mplayerhq.hu:/cvsroot/mplayer co main When asked for a password, just hit enter. A directory named 'main' will be created. You can later update your sources by saying cvs -z3 update -dPA from within that directory. ___________________________________ STEP1: Installing FFmpeg libavcodec ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you are using an official (pre)release, skip this step, since official releases include libavcodec. CVS sources and CVS snapshots do not include libavcodec. To verify if you do have libavcodec or not, check if the libavcodec subdirectory in the MPlayer source tree is empty or not. The FFmpeg project provides libavcodec, a very portable codec collection (among the supported formats is MPEG4/DivX) with excellent quality and speed, that is the preferred MPEG4/DivX codec of MPlayer. You have to get libavcodec directly from the FFmpeg CVS server. To get the FFmpeg sources, use the following commands in a suitable directory outside the MPlayer source directory: cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.ffmpeg.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ffmpeg login cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.ffmpeg.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ffmpeg co ffmpeg/libavcodec When asked for a password, you can just hit enter. Now, replace the empty libavcodec directory in the MPlayer source tree with the FFmpeg libavcodec source by removing the libavcodec subdirectory in the MPlayer source tree and then copying (symbolic linking does NOT suffice) the freshly downloaded FFmpeg libavcodec directory back into the MPlayer source tree. ______________________________ STEP2: Installing Win32 Codecs ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ MPlayer and libavcodec have builtin support for the most common audio and video formats, but some others are playable only with the Win32 DLLs or the XAnim binary plugins. Examples include WMV8 video, DivX with WMA audio (not normal DivX files) and Indeo. This step is not mandatory, but recommended for getting MPlayer to play more different file types. Note that Win32 codecs only work on Intel x86 compatible PCs. Unpack the codecs archive and put the contents in a directory where MPlayer will find them. The default directory is /usr/lib/win32/ but you can change that to something else by using the '--with-win32libdir=DIR' option when you run './configure'. __________________________ STEP3: Configuring MPlayer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ MPlayer has a lot of options that get selected in this phase. Run ./configure to configure MPlayer with the default options. The codecs you installed above should be autodetected. GUI support has to be enabled separately, run ./configure --enable-gui if you want to use the GUI. If something does not work as expected, try ./configure --help to see the available options and select what you need. The configure script prints a summary of enabled and disabled options. If you have something installed that configure fails to detect, check the file configure.log for errors and reasons for the failure. Repeat this step until you are satisfied with the enabled feature set. ________________________ STEP4: Compiling MPlayer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Now you can start the compilation by typing make You can install MPlayer with make install provided that you have write permission in the installation directory. If all went well, you can run MPlayer by typing 'mplayer'. A help screen with a summary of the most common options and keyboard shortcuts should be displayed. If you get 'unable to load shared library' or similar errors, run 'ldd ./mplayer' to check which libraries fail and go back to STEP 3 to fix it. Sometimes running 'ldconfig' is enough to fix the problem. NOTE: If you run Debian you can configure, compile and build a proper Debian .deb package with only one command: fakeroot debian/rules binary ____________________________________________ STEP5: Installing the onscreen display fonts ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Unpack the archive and choose one of the available font sizes. Then copy the font files of the corresponding size into /usr/local/share/mplayer/font/ or ~/.mplayer/font/ (or whatever you set with './configure --datadir=DIR'). ____________________________ STEP6: Installing a GUI skin ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Unpack the archive and put the contents in /usr/local/share/mplayer/Skin/ or ~/.mplayer/Skin/. MPlayer will use the skin in the default/ subdirectory of /usr/local/share/mplayer/Skin/ or ~/.mplayer/Skin/ unless told otherwise via the '-skin' switch. You should therefore rename your skin subdirectory or make a suitable symbolic link. __________________ STEP7: Let's play! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ That's it for the moment. To start playing movies, open a command line and try mplayer or for the GUI gmplayer gmplayer is a symbolic link to mplayer created by 'make install'. Without , MPlayer will come up and you will be able to use the GUI filepicker. To play a VCD track or a DVD title, try: mplayer -vcd 2 -cdrom-device /dev/hdc mplayer -dvd 1 -alang en -slang hu -dvd-device /dev/hdd See 'mplayer -help' and 'man mplayer' for further options. 'mplayer -vo help' will show you the available video output drivers. Experiment with the '-vo' switch to see which one gives you the best performance. If you get jerky playback or no sound, experiment with the '-ao' switch (see '-ao help') to choose between different audio drivers. Note that jerky playback is caused by buggy audio drivers or a slow processor and video card. With a good audio and video driver combination, one can play DVDs and 720x576 DivX files smoothly on a Celeron 366. Slower systems may need the '-framedrop' option. Questions you may have are probably answered in the rest of the documentation. The places to start reading are the man page, DOCS/documentation.html and DOCS/faq.html. If you find a bug, read DOCS/bugreports.html first!