MPlayer

MPlayer is one of the best media player applications available. Is is almost strictly monolithic, which means that it mainly consists of a single, relatively small executable, that already contains all necessary codecs. It doesn't need Windows codecs, but does have the ability to utilize external codecs for new formats it may not support natively.

MPlayer 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.

MPlayer is a command line application which has different optional GUI front-ends for each of its supported operating systems. Commonly used GUIs are gMplayer written in GTK+, MPlayer OS X Extended (for Mac OS X) and MPUI-hcb (for Windows). Cross-platform GUIs are also available, like SMPlayer (Windows and Linux).

MPlayer

For Windows users go to the downloads page and look for the link "MPlayer SVN Windows with SMPlayer GUI (recommended)" You can use the SMPlayer frontend or see our front end section below for other examples, including the popular MPUI front end for Windows.

Useful MPlayer Command Line Operations

These commands are to be used from console (MSDOS Prompt or Linux Shell) etc

mplayer filename                                 (open a video or audio file)
mplayer filename -subfile filename.sub            (video file with subtitles)
mplayer -vcd <trackno>                                     (open a vcd track)
mplayer -o vesa -cache 8192 -fs -dvd <trackno>     (play dvd using vesa mode)
mplayer -framedrop                    (fix slow hardware related video skips)

Playing a DVD with MPlayer on Linux

mplayer -dvd <track> [-dvd-device <device>]
mplayer -dvd 1 -dvd-device /dev/hdc

VCD on Linux

mplayer vcd://1 -cdrom-device /dev/hdc