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MPlayer is a free and open source media player distributed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License. The program is available for all major operating systems, including GNU/Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.
MPlayer is well known for its wide format support and is said to support more multimedia formats than any other player. In addition to its wide range of supported formats MPlayer can save to a file any content streamed in a format it supports. Also, a companion program, the movie encoder MEncoder, can take an audio or video file in one of the formats listed above and can encode it in several different formats, optionally applying various transforms along the way.
MPlayer is a command line application which has different optional GUIs for each of its supported operating systems. Commonly used GUIs are GMPlayer (an X Window System GUI for GNU/Linux and other Unix-like systems), MPlayer OS X (for Mac OS X), MPUI (for Windows) and WinMPLauncher (also for Windows). Several alternative GUI frontends are also available for each platform.
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. In the beginning most developers were from Hungary, but nowadays the developers come from all over the world. 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.
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 was made available for multiple operating systems.
Supported Media Formats
- Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs
- Container formats: 3gp, AVI, ASF, FLV, Matroska, MOV, MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia
- Video codecs: 3ivx, Cinepak, DivX, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, RealVideo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV, XviD
- Audio codecs: AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, MP3, RealAudio, Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA
Legal Issues
Most video and audio codecs are supported natively through the libavcodec library of the FFmpeg project. For those codecs where no open source decoder has been implemented yet MPlayer relies on binary codecs. It can even use Windows DLLs directly with the help of a DLL loader forked from avifile (which itself forked its loader from the Wine project).
The combination of CSS decryption software, Windows codec use, implementation of codecs covered by software patents, and the GPL 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. For these reasons MPlayer is not preferred by most GNU/Linux distributions with a strong commitment to free software despite its functionality. For example, it is not supported by the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.
See also
External links
- Official MPlayer Website, with extensive HTML documentation
- Projects related to MPlayer
- Documentation at the LinuxQuestions wiki
- MPlayer browser plugin for Mozilla
- MPlayer OS X
- MPUI - MPlayer for Windows
- Videotranscoding Wiki Documentation on server-side usage of mplayer for transcoding
Free video software | Linux media players | Mac OS media players | Windows media players | Free media players | Demoscene software
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"MPlayer"