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MPlayer Quickstart Guide:
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Welcome to MPlayer, the Unix movie player.  It can play most standard video
formats out of the box and almost all others with the help of external codecs.

This document is for getting you started in a few minutes.  It cannot answer all
your questions.  If you have problems, please read the documentation.  It is
extensive and should answer most of your questions.  Start by reading the manpage
and DOCS/documentation.html.


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STEP1: Compiling the sources
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You need to have the XFree86 development packages installed.  Otherwise this is
straightforward.  Unpack the sources and then run

  ./configure
  make
  make install

For the last step you need to have root privileges as usual.  Configure has a
lot of options, run './configure --help' to see them.

If you run Debian you can build a proper deb package with one command:

  fakeroot debian/rules binary

If you want a GUI, enable it with './configure --enable-gui' and install the GTK
development packages.


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STEP2: Installing FFmpeg libavcodec
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The FFmpeg project provides libavcodec, a very portable MPEG4/DivX codec with
excellent speed and quality.  It is the preferred 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.  If you are using an official
release tarball, skip this step, it includes libavcodec.

Remove the libavcodec subdirectory of the MPlayer sources and employ the following
commands in a separate directory to get the FFmpeg sources

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.ffmpeg.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ffmpeg login
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.ffmpeg.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ffmpeg co ffmpeg/libavcodec

Then move (symlinking does not suffice) the freshly downloaded libavcodec
directory back into the MPlayer source tree.  The libac3, liba52 and mpglib
subdirectories are not required, you may delete them if you wish.  Keep the
FFmpeg CVS subdirectories to be able to update from their CVS server.


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STEP3: Installing the onscreen display fonts
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To enable onscreen status display and DVD 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 create the
directory ~/.mplayer/font/ and copy the font files into that directory.


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STEP4: Installing the GUI skin
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If you want to have a GUI in addition to the command line, you need a skin.
Download a skin from the download page

  http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/dload.html

unpack it and put the contents in ~/.mplayer/Skin/default/.


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STEP5: Installing Win32 Codecs
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This is only necessary if you want to play ASF and WMA movies.  The builtin
codecs are much faster when playing divx and mpeg files.
Grab the codecs archive from the download page

  http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/dload.html

unpack it and put the contents in /usr/lib/win32/.


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STEP6: Running MPlayer
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You should be able to start playing movies now.  On the command line, try

  mplayer <moviefile>

or for a GUI

  mplayer -gui <moviefile>
  gmplayer <moviefile>

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.