Chapter 1. IntroductionChapter 1. IntroductionPrev   NextChapter 1. Introduction
MPlayer is a movie player for Linux (runs on
many other Unices, and non-x86 CPUs, see
Ports).
It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, OGG/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM,
NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, PVA, Matroska files, supported by
many native, XAnim, RealPlayer, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch
VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, RealMedia, Sorenson, Theora,
and MPEG-4 (DivX) movies too. Another big
feature of MPlayer is the wide range of
supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib,
fbdev, AAlib, libcaca, DirectFB, but you can use GGI and SDL (and this way all
their drivers) and some lowlevel card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and
Radeon, Mach64, Permedia3) too! Most of them support software or hardware
scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen.
MPlayer supports displaying through some
hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the DVB and
DXR3/Hollywood+. And what about the nice big
antialiased shaded subtitles
(14 supported types)
with European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic, Korean
fonts, and the onscreen display (OSD)?

The player is rock solid playing damaged MPEG files (useful for some VCDs),
and it plays bad AVI files which are unplayable with the famous windows
media player. Even AVI files without index chunk are playable, and you can
temporarily rebuild their indexes with the -idx option, or
permanently with MEncoder, thus enabling
seeking! As you see, stability and quality are the most important things,
but the speed is also amazing. There is also a powerful filter system for
video and audio manipulation.

MEncoder (MPlayer's Movie
Encoder) is a simple movie encoder, designed to encode
MPlayer-playable movies
(AVI/ASF/OGG/DVD/VCD/VOB/MPG/MOV/VIV/FLI/RM/NUV/NET/PVA)
to other MPlayer-playable formats (see below).
It can encode with various codecs, like
MPEG-4 (DivX4)
(one or two passes), libavcodec,
PCM/MP3/VBR MP3
audio.
MEncoder features
Encoding from the wide range of fileformats and decoders of
MPlayer

Encoding to all the codecs of FFmpeg's
libavcodec

Video encoding from V4L compatible TV tuners

Encoding/multiplexing to interleaved AVI files with proper index

Creating files from external audio stream

1, 2 or 3 pass encoding

VBR MP3 audio
Important
VBR MP3 audio doesn't always play nicely on windows players!


PCM audio

Stream copying

Input A/V synchronizing (PTS-based, can be disabled with
-mc 0 option)

fps correction with -ofps option (useful when encoding
30000/1001 fps VOB to 24000/1001 fps AVI)

Using our very powerful filter system (crop, expand, flip, postprocess,
rotate, scale, rgb/yuv conversion)

Can encode DVD/VOBsub AND text subtitles
into the output file

Can rip DVD subtitles to VOBsub format

MPlayer and MEncoder
can be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2.
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