Kovensky’s MPlayer

MPlayer is currently the lightest and most compatible video player in the free software world. It can play anything ranging from your old VCDs to the videos using the state-of-the-art H.264 codec. For any codecs that mplayer doesn’t support yet (or where it isn’t good enough), it can use the binary decoders from windows. Its home page is located here.

WARNING

On the very first time that mplayer is run on a system, it will build a cache of every font you have installed on your computer and save it to %TEMP%. This may take a long time, depending on the number of fonts installed on your computer; while the cache is being built, MPlayer/SMPlayer will stop responding. This cache will be rebuilt if you install/uninstall fonts from your computer too.

Installation

Just download the latest mplayer.exe and put it wherever you want.

Using with SMPlayer

SMPlayer can be found here. You can get the installer version or one of the two .7z packages. To install or update MPlayer in SMPlayer, open the folder where you put SMPlayer, create/open the mplayer folder inside it, and put the new mplayer.exe in there, overwriting any older version if present.

Usage

Follow the instructions below if you are using mplayer. SMPlayer should be pretty self-explanatory.

Basics: Just drag a media file and drop it on “mplayer.exe”. To pause/unpause, click mplayer’s window. To enter fullscreen mode, right click the window.

Keyboard Cheat Sheet

Key	Function
‘q’	Quit mplayer
Space	Pause/unpause
Left/Right	Skip 10 seconds backwards/forwards
Up/Down	Skip 1 minute
PgUp/PgDn	Skip 10 minutes
‘!’/'@’	Go to the previous/next chapter
‘9′/’0′	Decreases/increases volume
‘f’	Go fullscreen
’s’	Take screenshot (needs enabling on the config file)
‘o’	Shows several levels of on-screen display. The levels are: Disabled, Minimal, Time and Full.
‘#’	Changes audio track. Known broken with OGG/OGM files.
‘j’	Changes subtitle track
‘v’	Shows/hides subtitles
‘z’/'x’	Changes the subtitle delay
‘d’	Changes frame dropping mode: None (default), Drop, Hard (may corrupt the image)
‘['/']‘	Decreases/increases playback speed
Backspace	Go back to normal speed

Enabling screenshot

Open the folder where you put mplayer. Inside it, open the mplayer folder and then open the config file with wordpad (Start->Programs->Accessories->WordPad. Notepad shows it wrongly). Add this line to it: ‘vf-add=screenshot’. Save, close.
Note: not added by default because of possible performance issues on certain configurations.

Getting support

Many other mplayer users (and I) can be found on #mplayer@chat.freenode.net. Just enter it and ask your question, and tell me you’re using my build.

FAQ and Manual

The FAQ can be found here: MPlayer_FAQ
The Manual can be found here: MPlayer manpage