MPlayer, the opensource movie player
Written by Net Llama! and last updated
on 27-December-2002.
This player should work on any Linux system with a 2.2.18 or 2.4.x kernel at least glibc-2.1 & at
least XFree86-3.3.6.
This player will allow you to play
movies that have traditionally been the domain of MS-Windows, AVI,
MPEG ASF, WMV (Windows Media Player), Apple Quicktime & DIVX
formats (with stereo sound).
Note, MPlayer will also play DVDs, however I recommend Xine for this purpose.
1) Everything that you will need to download can be found here:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/dload.html
2) You *must* download the following packages:
- MPlayer: the code for the player itself
- Win32codec: the code that allows you to play AVI & DIVX
format movies
-
More binary codecs (Xanim, RealPlayer, QuickTime etc)
These are optional:
- any of the font packages (you only need fonts to utilize films with subtitles)
- Skins (required if you want a pretty GUI frontend to MPlayer, rather than just running it from the command line)
You will need to download at least 1 Skin. Any additional Skins are up to you. If you want to use the
GUI, then you must have gtk and libpng installed. Most recent Linux distros have these by default.
3) As the root user, bunzip2 the contents of the codec packages into /usr/lib/win32.
4) Uncompress & extract the contents of the MPlayer
package. Then enter the newly created MPlayer directory,
and run the following:
Note that there are many, many more possible configuration
options. The above gives you the ability to use the GUI
frontend. Run
"./configure --help | more " to see all the options,
many of which are autodetected.
5) If you want the GUI front end, uncompress &
extract the Skin(s) that you downloaded into /usr/local/share/mplayer/Skin
6) That should be all, now simply run mplayer
and start watching movies!
There is also now an MPlayer plugin for Mozilla, which lets you watch the movies in your web browser. Look here for my SxS on how to install it.
