MPlayer

MPlayer is a free, open source media player with support for more multimedia formats than any other media player. Among them are:

MPlayer supports a variety of different output devices to display video, including X11, Quartz Compositor, DirectX, VESA, SDL and fancy ones like ASCII art and Blinkenlights.

MPlayer can play all common types of streams available over the internet and save them to a file.

The program runs on all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Windows and Mac OS X.

MPlayer is distributed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License. It used to be called "MPlayer – The Movie Player for Linux", but now that it supports many operating systems besides Linux this was shortened to "MPlayer – The Movie Player".

MPlayer is primarily a command line application but has an optional GUI (GMPlayer) that runs under the X Window System. Several alternative GUI frontends are available.

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. It can even use Windows DLLs directly with the help of a DLL loader forked from the WINE project.

The combination of CSS decryption software, Windows codec use, implementation of codecs covered by software patents, and the GPL places a fully-functional MPlayer in the legal bind shared by all open source multimedia players. In the past MPlayer used to include OpenDivX, a GPL-incompatible decoder library. For this reason, it has yet to be admitted to the Debian distribution of Linux.

Development of MPlayer began in 2000. The original author Árpád Gereöffy was soon joined by many other programmers. In the beginning most developers were from Hungary, but nowadays the developers come from all over the world. Alex Beregszászi has maintained MPlayer since 2003 when Árpád Gereöffy left MPlayer development to begin work on a second generation MPlayer. Unfortunately the MPlayer G2 project was abandoned for a number of reasons.

A companion program, the movie encoder MEncoder, can take an audio or video file in one of the formats listed above and can encode it in several different formats, optionally applying various transforms along the way.

See also

• List of media players
• Comparison of media players

External links

• Official MPlayer Website, with extensive HTML documentation
• Download
• List of supported codecs
• Projects related to MPlayer
• MPlayer OS X
• MPlayer browser plugin for Mozilla