2.4. Fonts and OSD2.4. Fonts and OSDPrev Chapter 2. Installation Next2.4. Fonts and OSD
You need to tell MPlayer which font to use to
enjoy OSD and subtitles. Any TrueType font or special bitmap fonts will
work. However, TrueType fonts are recommended as they look far better,
can be properly scaled to the movie size and cope better with different
encodings.
2.4.1. TrueType fonts
There are two ways to get TrueType fonts to work. The first is to pass
the -font option to specify a TrueType font file on
the command line. This option will be a good candidate to put in your
configuration file (see the manual page for details).
The second is to create a symlink called subfont.ttf
to the font file of your choice. Either

ln -s /path/to/sample_font.ttf ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf

for each user individually or a system-wide one:

ln -s /path/to/sample_font.ttf $PREFIX/share/mplayer/subfont.ttf


If MPlayer was compiled with
fontconfig support, the above methods
won't work, instead -font expects a
fontconfig font name
and defaults to the sans-serif font. Example:

mplayer -font 'Bitstream Vera Sans' anime.mkv


To get a list of fonts known to
fontconfig,
use fc-list.
2.4.2. bitmap fonts
If for some reason you wish or need to employ bitmap fonts, download a set
from our homepage. You can choose between various
ISO fonts
and some sets of fonts
contributed by users
in various encodings.

Uncompress the file you downloaded to
~/.mplayer or
$PREFIX/share/mplayer.
Then rename or symlink one of the extracted directories to
font, for example:

ln -s ~/.mplayer/arial-24 ~/.mplayer/font


ln -s $PREFIX/share/mplayer/arial-24 $PREFIX/share/mplayer/font


Fonts should have an appropriate font.desc file
which maps unicode font positions to the actual code page of the
subtitle text. Another solution is to have UTF-8-encoded subtitles
and use the -utf8 option or give the subtitles
file the same name as your video file with a .utf
extension and have it in the same directory as the video file.
2.4.3. OSD menu
MPlayer has a completely user definiable
OSD Menu interface.
Note
the Preferences menu is currently UNIMPLEMENTED!
Installation
compile MPlayer by passing the
--enable-menu to ./configure

make sure you have an OSD font installed

copy etc/menu.conf to your
.mplayer directory

copy etc/input.conf to your
.mplayer directory, or to the
system-wide MPlayer config dir (default:
/usr/local/etc/mplayer)

check and edit input.conf to enable menu movement keys
(it is described there).

start MPlayer by the following example:
mplayer -menu file.avi

push any menu key you defined
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