Top notch movie players for Linux, MPlayer

There is of course a hole bunch of movie player for Linux/Unix/Windows/Mac OS, but the one I would like to mention in particular, is MPlayer. The latest released version of Mplayer 1.0pre8 has been released since june, and can be downloaded from Mplayers website.

Mplayer supports some many different codecs today, that you should be able to play any file that contains audio or video streams. Play avi, mpg, ogg, mp3 files, wmv .. ... ... Great codecs for divx, xvid, DVD's, VCD etc.

• OSS (Open Sound System) - factory standard under UNIX
• SDL (Simple Directmedia Layer) - wrapper library with support for various systems
• ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) 0.5/0.9/1.0 for Linux
• SUN audio driver for BSD and Solaris8/9 users
• SGI audio for IRIX
• Mac OS X audio
• Windows audio
• NAS (Network Audio System)
• ESD (ESound Daemon)
• ARTS (KDE Sound System)
• JACK (Jack Audio Connection Kit)

Installation is really simple. There are prebuilt rpm files of MPlayer for Red Hat and Fedora on the Mplayer site. Otherwise, just download the source and compile the source from scratch.

First out is to download all the different codecs. You can find the codecs at MPlayer site.
You will need to copy all codec files to /usr/local/lib/codecs

After that, you are ready to install Mplayer.

$ bunzip MPlayer-1.0pre8.tar.bz2
$ tar -xvf MPlayer-1.0pre8.tar
$ cd MPlayer-1.0pre8
$ ./configure (with your options)
$ make
$ sudo make install (if you like to copy all the compiled binaries out of the source directory )

To start MPlayer from the command line, simply

$ mplayer -vo X11 spiderman.avi -fs -zoom
(fs = full screen )

Check out the creators website for details and to download MPlayer today.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html