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 there is a GUI with skin support in the alpha development stage. 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. It is extensive and should answer most of your questions. Also read the manpage to learn how to use MPlayer. To compile MPlayer with X11 support, you need to have the XFree86 development packages installed, for the GUI you also need the GTK 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 video performance. Most cards require special drivers not included with standard X11, to drive the 2-D video acceleration features of your card. 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, use vidix for BSD. - 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. Without accelerated video even a 800MHz P3 may be too slow to play DVDs. ___________________________________ STEP1: Installing FFmpeg libavcodec ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you are using an official release, skip this step, since official releases include libavcodec. To verify this check if the libavcodec subdirectory is empty or contains sources. The FFmpeg project provides libavcodec, a very portable MPEG4/DivX codec with excellent speed and quality. It is the preferred MPEG4/DivX codec of MPlayer and used to be included in the MPlayer CVS tree. This is no longer the case and 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 -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 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, some others are playable only with the Win32 DLLs or the XAnim binary plugins. Examples include WMV 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. Grab the codecs archive from the download page http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/dload.html unpack it 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 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' and get a summary of the most common options and keyboard shortcuts. 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. NOTE: If you run Debian you can configure, compile and build a proper deb package with only one command: fakeroot debian/rules binary ____________________________________________ STEP5: Installing the onscreen display fonts ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To enable onscreen status display and ASCII subtitles you need some fonts. Get them from our homepage: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/dload.html 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 whatever you set with './configure --datadir=DIR'). ____________________________ STEP6: Installing a GUI skin ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Please remember that the GUI is still in the alpha development stage and not completely finished yet. Features like playlist and preferences do not work at all. Expect them for the 1.0 release. Basic stuff like file selection and seeking works, though. If you want to use the GUI you need to download a skin, since MPlayer does not come with a skin by default. Choose one from the download page http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/dload.html unpack it and put the contents in /usr/local/share/mplayer/Skin/. MPlayer will use the skin in the default/ subdirectory of /usr/local/share/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 mplayer -gui gmplayer 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 smoothly on a Celeron 366. Questions you may have are probably answered in the rest of the documentation. The place to start reading is DOCS/documentation.html.