MPlayer is a free and open source media player distributed under the GNU General Public License. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS and MorphOS are also available. The Windows versions works, with some minor problems, also in DOS using HX DOS Extender. A port for DOS using DJGPP is also available. Windows Media Player (WMP) is a digital media player and media library application developed by Microsoft that is used for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based devices. ... MPlayer logo For the free media player, see mplayer. ... Image File history File links MPlayer. ... For other uses, see Software developer (disambiguation). ... A software release refers to the creation and availability of a new version of a computer software product. ... is the 280th day of the year (281st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. ... A software release refers to the creation and availability of a new version of a computer software product. ... A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... In computing, a platform describes some sort of framework, either in hardware or software, which allows software to run. ... A cross-platform (or platform independent) programming language, software application or hardware device works on more than one system platform (e. ... This article is about the properties of language in general. ... A software license is a legal agreement which may take the form of a proprietary or gratuitous license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software. ... GPL redirects here. ... A website (alternatively, web site or Web site) is a collection of Web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that is hosted on one or more web servers, usually accessible via the Internet. ... Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... GPL redirects here. ... An operating system (OS) is a software that manages computer resources and provides programmers with an interface used to access those resources. ... This article is about operating systems that use the Linux kernel. ... Diagram of the relationships between several Unix-like systems A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. ... Windows redirects here. ... Mac OS X (pronounced ) is a line of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. ... OS/2 is a computer operating system, initially created by Microsoft and IBM, then later developed by IBM exclusively. ... Syllable is a free and open source operating system for Intel x86 Pentium and compatible processors. ... AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. ... MorphOS is a mixed proprietary and open source operating system produced for the Pegasos PowerPC (PPC)-processor-based computer, most models of PPC-accelerated classic Amiga computers, and the EFIKA PPC consumer device. ... This article is about the family of closely related operating systems for the IBM PC compatible platform. ... HX DOS-Extender is a free DOS extender with built-in Win32 PE file format support. ... This article is about the family of closely related operating systems for the IBM PC compatible platform. ... DJGPP is a 32-bit C/C++/ObjC/Ada/Fortran development suite for 386+ PCs that runs under DOS (or any OS that runs DOS . ...

MPlayer supports a wide variety of media formats. In addition to its wide range of supported formats MPlayer can also save all streamed content to a file.

A companion program, MEncoder, can take an input stream or file and transcode it into several different output formats, optionally applying various transforms along the way. Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Mplayer#Mencoder MEncoder is a free command line video decoding, encoding and filtering tool released under the GNU General Public License. ... Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion from one (usually lossy) codec to another. ...

MPlayer is a command line application which has different optional GUIs for each of its supported operating systems. Commonly used GUIs are gmplayer (the default GUI for GNU/Linux and other Unix-like systems, and Microsoft Windows), MPlayer OS X (for Mac OS X), MPUI (for Windows) and WinMPLauncher (also for Windows). Several other GUI frontends are also available for each platform. This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... GUI can refer to the following: GUI is short for graphical user interface, a term used to describe a type of interface in computing. ...

Development

Development of MPlayer began in 2000. The original author, Árpád Gereöffy (known as A'rpi / Astral in the demoscene), was soon joined by many other programmers. The project was started because A'rpi was unable to find any satisfactory video players for Linux. The first version was titled mpg12play v0.1 and was hacked together in a half hour using libmpeg3 from http://www.heroinewarrior.com/. After mpg12play v0.95pre5, the code was merged with an AVI player based on avifile's Win32 DLL loader to form MPlayer v0.3 in November 2000 ^[1]. In the beginning most developers were from Hungary, but currently the developers are located worldwide. Alex Beregszászi has maintained MPlayer since 2003 when Árpád Gereöffy left MPlayer development to begin work on a second generation MPlayer. The MPlayer G2 project is currently paused for a number of reasons. ^[2] Year 2000 (MM) was a leap year starting on Saturday. ... The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes itself on producing demos, non-interactive audio-visual presentations, which are run real-time on a computer. ... Look up Avi in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Windows API is a set of APIs, (application programming interfaces) available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. ... DLL is an abbreviation which can commonly mean: Data link layer, a layer in the OSI network architecture model Dynamically Linked Library, a binary application library file format in Microsoft Windows and IBM OS/2 (see the Dynamic linking section of the Library (computer science) article) Doubly Linked List, a... Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

MPlayer was previously called "MPlayer - The Movie Player for Linux" by its developers but this was later shortened to "MPlayer - The Movie Player" after it became commonly used on multiple operating systems.

Supported media formats

MPlayer being run via a terminal

• Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs
• Container formats: 3GP, AVI, ASF, FLV, Matroska, MOV (QuickTime), MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia
• Video formats: Cinepak, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV
• Audio formats: AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Intel Music Coder, Monkey's Audio, MP3, RealAudio, Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA
• Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, Sami, SRT, SubViewer, VOBsub, VPlayer

MPlayer also supports a variety of different output drivers for displaying video, including X11, OpenGL, DirectX, Quartz Compositor, VESA, Framebuffer, SDL and rarer ones such as ASCII art and Blinkenlights. It can also be used to display TV from a TV card using the device tv://channel, or play and capture radio channels via radio://channel|frequency. CD redirects here. ... DVD (also known as Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc - see Etymology) is a popular optical disc storage media format. ... VCD redirects here. ... A container format is a computer file format that can contain various types of data, compressed by means of standardized codecs. ... 3GP is a multimedia container format defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for use on 3G mobile phones. ... Look up Avi in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Advanced Systems Format (formerly Advanced Streaming Format, Active Streaming Format) is Microsofts proprietary digital audio/digital video container format, especially meant for streaming media. ... FLV (Flash Video) is a proprietary file format used to deliver video over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player (formerly known as Macromedia Flash Player) version 6, 7, 8, or 9. ... The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free Container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks inside a single file. ... QuickTime is a multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc. ... MP4 can refer to: MPEG-4 Part 14 file format Møller-Plesset perturbation theory of the fourth order This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... NUT is a patent-free, multimedia container format originally conceived by a few MPlayer and FFmpeg developers that were dissatisfied with the limitations of all currently available multimedia container formats such as AVI or Matroska. ... Ogg is an open standard for a free container format for digital multimedia, unrestricted by software patents and designed for efficient streaming and manipulation. ... OGM meaning Ogg Media File, was developed by Tobias Waldvogel. ... RealMedia is a multimedia container format created by RealNetworks. ... Compressed with Cinepak, quality 40% Cinepak is a video codec, developed by Radius Inc to accommodate 1x (150 kbyte/s) CD-ROM transfer rates. ... A MiniDV Camcorder For other uses, see DV (disambiguation). ... H.263 is a video codec designed by the ITU-T as a low-bitrate encoding solution for videoconferencing. ... H.264 is a standard for video compression. ... Huffyuv (or HuffYUV) is a lossless video codec created by Ben Rudiak-Gould which is meant to replace uncompressed YCbCr as a video capture format. ... Indeo Video (commonly known now simply as Indeo) is a video codec developed by Intel in 1992. ... Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) is an informal name for multimedia formats where each video frame or interlaced field of a digital video sequence is separately compressed as a JPEG image. ... MPEG-1 was an early standard for lossy compression of video and audio. ... MPEG-2 is a standard for the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information [1]. It is widely used around the world to specify the format of the digital television signals that are broadcast by terrestrial (over-the-air), cable, and direct broadcast satellite TV systems. ... MPEG-4 Part 2 is a video compression technology developed by MPEG. It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standard (ISO/IEC 14496-2). ... RealVideo is a proprietary video format developed by RealNetworks. ... The Sorenson codec (also known as Sorenson Video Codec 3 or SVQ3) is a digital video codec devised by the company Sorenson Media and used by Apples QuickTime and the newest version of Macromedia Flash, a special version called Sorenson Spark. ... Theora is a video codec being developed by the Xiph. ... Windows Media Video (WMV) is a generic name for the set of streaming video technologies developed by Microsoft. ... Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. ... Description Dolby Digital is the trademark for Dolby Laboratories AC-3 audio coding system. ... Apple Lossless (also known as Apple Lossless Encoder, ALE, or Apple Lossless Audio Codec, ALAC) is an audio codec developed by Apple Computer for lossless encoding of digital music. ... Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) is a Audio data compression scheme optimized for speech coding. ... FLAC, an acronym for Free Lossless Audio Codec, is a popular file format for audio data compression. ... Monkey’s Audio is a file format for audio data compression. ... For other uses, see MP3 (disambiguation). ... RealAudio is a proprietary audio format developed by RealNetworks. ... SHN (Shorten) is a file format used to losslessly compress CD-quality audio files (44. ... Speex is a free software speech codec that may be used on VoIP applications and podcasts. ... Vorbis is an open source, lossy audio codec project headed by the Xiph. ... Windows Media Audio (WMA) is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. ... In printed material In printed material, a subtitle is an explanatory or alternate title. ... SubStation Alpha (or Sub Station Alpha), abbreviated SSA, is a subtitle file format created by Kotus that allows for more advanced subtitles than the conventional SRT and similar formats. ... A commonly-used symbol indicating that a program or movie is closed-captioned. ... Look up Sami, sami in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Subrip is an optical character recognition program for Windows which rips DVD subtitles and their timings as a text file, and the name of the subtitle format used by this software. ... VobSub is a tool that rips subtitles from VOB files. ... “X11” redirects here. ... OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. ... Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. ... Quartz Compositor is the window server in Mac OS X. It is responsible for presenting and maintaining rasterized, rendered graphics from the rest of the Core Graphics framework and other renderers in the Quartz technologies family. ... The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) is an international body, founded in the late 1980s by NEC Home Electronics and eight other video display adapter manufacturers. ... The framebuffer is a part of RAM in a computer allocated to hold the graphics information for one frame or picture. ... Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform multimedia free software library written in C that creates an abstraction over various platforms graphics, sound, and input APIs, allowing a developer to write a computer game or other multimedia application once and run it on many operating systems including GNU/Linux... ASCII art, an artistic medium relying primarily on computers for presentation, consists of pictures pieced together from characters (preferably from the 95 printable characters defined by ASCII). ... Aerial view of the Berlin installation Project Blinkenlights was created by the German Chaos Computer Club in 2001 as a celebration of its 20th birthday. ...

Since version 1.0RC1, decent built-in support for the ASS/SSA subtitle format is present by the use of libass, though it still has issues rendering some languages (such as those requiring Complex text layout). SubStation Alpha (or Sub Station Alpha), abbreviated SSA, is a subtitle file format created by Kotus that allows for more advanced subtitles than the conventional SRT and similar formats. ...

Legal issues

Most video and audio formats are supported natively through the libavcodec library of the FFmpeg project. For those formats where no open source decoder has been implemented yet MPlayer relies on binary codecs. It can use Windows DLLs directly with the help of a DLL loader forked from avifile (which itself forked its loader from the Wine project). libavcodec is a free software/open source LGPL-licensed library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data; it is written in the C programming language. ... Illustration of an application which may use libvorbisfile. ... FFmpeg is a collection of software libraries that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video in numerous formats. ... DLL is an abbreviation which can commonly mean: Data link layer, a layer in the OSI network architecture model Dynamically Linked Library, a binary application library file format in Microsoft Windows and IBM OS/2 (see the Dynamic linking section of the Library (computer science) article) Doubly Linked List, a... In software, a project fork or branch happens when a developer (or a group of them) takes code from a project and starts to develop independently of the rest. ... Wine is a software application which aims to allow Unix-like computer operating systems on the x86 architecture to execute programs that were originally written for Microsoft Windows. ...

The combination of CSS decryption software and implementation of formats covered by software patents places a fully-functional MPlayer in the legal bind shared by most open source multimedia players. In the past MPlayer used to include OpenDivX, a GPL-incompatible decoder library. This has since been removed, making MPlayer itself completely free software. Usage of patented codecs in free software however is a still pending potential problem affecting FFmpeg, MPlayer and similar software when used in countries where software patents apply. Content Scramble System (CSS) is an encryption system used on some DVDs. ... Software patent does not have a universally accepted definition. ... XviD is an open source MPEG-4 video codec originally based on OpenDivX. XviD was started by a group of volunteer programmers after the OpenDivX source was closed in July 2001. ... Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things. ... FFmpeg is a collection of software libraries that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video in numerous formats. ...

See also

• MEncoder

• List of multimedia (audio/video) codecs
  • Open source codecs and containers
  • Comparison of video codecs
  • Comparison of audio codecs

• Comparison of (audio/video) container formats

• List of other software media players
• Comparison of media players
  • KPlayer - KDE media player that uses MPlayer as the backend.
  • XBMC (XBox Media Center) - software media player for the Xbox game console that uses MPlayer as the main video player backend.
  • VLC media player/VideoLAN (uses libavcodec from FFmpeg, and shares some other libraries with MPlayer)
  • xine (uses libavcodec from FFmpeg, and shares some other libraries with MPlayer)

• Screencast
• Sipie - uses MPlayer to stream Sirius Satellite Radio on-line channels

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Mplayer#Mencoder MEncoder is a free command line video decoding, encoding and filtering tool released under the GNU General Public License. ... Image File history File links Free_Software_Portal_Logo. ... The following is a list of codecs. ... This is a listing of open source multimedia codecs and containers. ... Comparison of video codecs - is a process of codecs evaluation of similarities and differences. ... The following tables compare general and technical information for a variety of audio codecs. ... This table compares features of container formats. ... The following is a list of media players. ... The following comparison of media players compares general and technical information for a number of software media player programs. ... KPlayer is a multimedia player for the KDE desktop environment. ... For the NYSE stock ticker symbol KDE, see 4Kids Entertainment. ... XBMC (formerly named Xbox Media Center) is a free and open source cross-platform media-player and entertainment hub. ... For the Xboxs successor, see Xbox 360. ... VLC media player is a free software media player by the VideoLAN project. ... VideoLAN is a software development project comprising two multi-platform computer programs—VLC media player and VideoLAN Server (VLS)—and several audio/video decoding and decryption libraries. ... xine (officially pronounced [ksi:n], like the name Maxine without Ma[1]) is a multimedia playback engine for Unix-like operating systems released under the GNU General Public License. ... A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration. ... This page may meet Wikipedia’s criteria for speedy deletion. ... Sirius Satellite Radio NASDAQ: SIRI is one of two satellite radio (SDARS) services operating in the United States and Canada, along with XM Satellite Radio. ...

External links

• Official MPlayer Website, with extensive HTML documentation
• #mplayer on freenode

Notes

1. ^ Appendix D. History
2. ^ Linux.com :: An MPlayer project update