MPlayer Developers Interviewed

cruocitae writes "Three of the MPlayer developers just gave an interview, talking about the "mysterious" versioning system of their software and shared a few secrets about the upcoming releases, for example some words about the long-awaited Windows GUI, and of course, DVD menus. Project integrity also was a subject.."

For Windows at least- BSplayer instead

[NeMon'ess]

I tried MPlayer a year or two ago for Windows. I'm sure it's much improved since then. I've been sticking with BSplayer [bsplayer.com] though since it has so much functionality and usable skins. It has easy aspect ratio correction, low CPU usage, and key re-mapping, among it's many useful features. The key controls is what converted me from the other players I tried.

Anyone tried both more recently?

Re:For Windows at least- BSplayer instead

[NutscrapeSucks]

The programs don't really compare. BSPlayer is a front-end to Windows Media (see also MPC and ZoomPlayer). MPlayer is a reimplementation of a bunch of codecs and therefore independant of the WM infrastructure.

Re:Is mplayer relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. I don't want to use a GUI.
2. xine doesn't play many files I try, and I don't want to figure out how to fix it.
3. mplayer plays video files on slow machines smoother than xine.

Re:Is mplayer relevant?

[grasshoppa]

I don't want to use a GUI.

Neither do I. I have xine called from my myth box, which doesn't have a keyboard.

xine doesn't play many files I try, and I don't want to figure out how to fix it.

I haven't had any problems with VOBs, MPGs, AVIs, ISOs.

mplayer plays video files on slow machines smoother than xine.

Subjective. I've had smooth dvd playback on a pIII 550 ( coppermine ).

Re:Is mplayer relevant?

[Cinder6]

In my experience, mplayer runs faster (and has mencoder). Xine always seems to desync audio and video when fast forwarding in large files, on every system I have tried it on. Also, I've never had a problem opening a file in mplayer, but I have in xine.

I'll agree that xine is better for DVDs, though!

Re:VLC or MPlayer

[Yold]

VLC seems to be the fastest client between quicktime and mplayer on OSX. Both VLC and MPlayer were native builds too (no xdarwin). I have a slow, old 600mhz ibook, and I am able to surf the web, open apps, etc, and really never see choppy video. Especially with large video files MPlayer and Quicktime seem to bog down, I was unable to watch a 70 mb episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force without horrible framerates on either QT or MPlayer, but VLC worked perfectly.

Re:When will it stop segfaulting?

[Solra Bizna]

MPlayer is very sensitive to compiler version and optimization flags. Try a different compiler, or a different version of the same compiler.

-:sigma.SB

Re:When will it stop segfaulting?

[evilviper]

I'm constantly running into segfaults in mplayer.

Segfaults are very, very rare. If you are seeing one, you should report it: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.ht ml [mplayerhq.hu]

Major problems like that, always get fixed quickly.

As I said, segfaults are very rare these days. Most of the time segfaults are reported, it's buggy hardware (hot CPU, RAM, videocard, etc.) or a known-buggy version of GCC (2.96, 3.3, etc).

Re:Is mplayer relevant?

[evilviper]

From what I've seen, xine does everything that mplayer does, and more, so why bother.

Xine is much slower, has a terrible interface, supports fewer audio/video codecs, takes longer to get support for newer codecs, doesn't do ANY encoding at all, doesn't support a fraction as many output audio/video devices. Doesn't have a fraction of the great video/audio filters that MPlayer does. Uses far, far more CPU-time than MPlayer. Has a god-awful interface, and no simple command-line version. Murders puppies. Doesn't include options like allowing you to output JPEGs out of every 100ths frame. Doesn't allow you to process the video, then output to yuv4mpeg for encoding with other programs. etc.

The difference between XINE and MPlayer are really the difference between Windows and Unix... Do you want a monolithic program, which can't be scripted, and has many, many restrictions imposed on it, or a small, simple tool that you can script to manipulate and modify data any way you choose?

Video on Linux

[Ponga]

Here is how I attack trying to play a video file or DVD on Linux:

First choice: VLC
Second Choice: Mplayer
Third Choice: Xine
Fourth Choice: Boot into Windoze :-(

Re:VLC or MPlayer

[pklinken]

I have a 400 mhz G4 Powerbook and MPlayer plays everything smoothly (usually even in reduced CPU mode).
However, if I have the Preview function in Finder turned on, and it tries to preview a 700 mb DivX, I end up killing Finder because it takes all CPU resources until it's done previewing (seemingly forever).

MEncoder is fantastic

[Pedrito]

I don't use MPlayer, largely because the built-in UI (or lack thereof) makes it a pain to deal with. There are front-ends for it, but it's just not worth the trouble.

MEncoder, on the other hand is amazingly powerful. It's also a pain in the butt to use. I also have to say, the support, at least on the MEncoder forum is very lacking. When I first started using it, I was largely derided for not knowing all about video encoding to begin with and got more than one RTFM response.

The documentation is extensive, but the organization could definitely use some work and a few more real world examples would be helpful.

That said, after a month or so of struggling with it, I am pretty competent with it now and have yet to find a situation where it can't do what I want it to do. Convert from one format to another, resync video, make DVD compatible MPEGS (though it doesn't compose DVDs), etc. It's got a variet of filters, including I think 4 just for de-interlacing (I do a lot of TV captures to raw MPEG that need to be converted to AVI).

So the program itself is excellent. The support however, could definitely use some work. If you want to see some newbie bashing, the mencoder mailing list definitely a good place to hang out.

What is happening to the Mac OS X port?

[kgp]

From TFA:

Me: What do you think, how much percent of the users use the Windows, FreeBSD and other ports?

Diego: The Windows port will probably get popular once we commit the Windows GUI, which should happen soon; already some people seem to use the command line version on Windows. MPlayer OS X is popular as well.

I use MPlayer all the time on Mac OS X.

The problem is seeing any visible progress on this port. Or even fixing major bugs and releasing a build.

The current release is the MPlayer-dev-CVS-050904.dmg (i.e. September 4th 2005). This release had a massive bug that rendered the playlist an unusable -- you could add items to it. And the menu bar was not being hidden in full screen mode on the default video renderer. I'd label both of these showstoppers (breaks major functionality) and would expect a fix. It's now 8 months later and not even a dev CVS build.

So I continue to the use the MPlayer-dev-CVS-050724.dmg version.

I've never been able to find nightly builds of the Mac OS X port, either. Not through lack of trying but maybe I missed something.

Is any active development taking place on the Mac version?

Viva La MPlayer!

[miyako]

I've played with a number of various multimedia applications, and I always come back to mplayer. Personally, I use KMplayer [kde.org] when I want a GUI, since it has a few nice features that GMplayer doesn't (drag and drop playlist, maintains the correct aspect ratio of the file when resizing, nicer integration with KDE). I still occasionally use Ogle [chalmers.se] for DVDs, but I'm eagerly anticipating MPlayer supporting DVD menus.
For those of you who might have stuck with Xine based players and haven't played around much with MPlayer, there are a few reasons I really like it:
The largest reason is that it plays bloody everything. I've personally never come across a file that I couldn't open with MPlayer. The worst I've ever run into is in some files that are slightly corrupted I've had to use the -idx flag to reindex the file so that I can gracefully skip over bad sections of the file instead of the video just stopping playing. I find this particularly handy when I'm downloading television shows off bittorrent and the seeders all go away when I'm at like 90%.
Mplayer also seems more lightweight ot me than Xine. Most of the time, if I'm watching video at my computer, it's because I'm doing something that's taking long enough that I'm sitting at the desk waiting for it to finish (compiling a lot of software, doing 3D rendering, etc.) so it's nice to be able to dedicate more cycles to whatever real work is getting done while still being able to relax with a video.

Re:Is mplayer relevant?

[diegocgteleline.es]

"monolithic" is what makes mplayer feel to me. It's just me? Lots of options, yes, really versatile, but....

Don't get me wrong. I've zero idea about mplayer internals, but I wonder why ej: mplayer is a big binary monolith instead of something more modular which can be used by other people.

Xine may not be perfect, but I've seen people reusing xine in other places: enlightenment 17, for one. Or totem-xine which has, BTW, a firefox plugin to allow people see videos with a gui to handle videos, something that linux desktop has been missing for years (and don't even mention the useful but ugly hack that mozplugger is, please). Not to mention that it's used by nautilus to do things like ej: generate thumbnails. Mplayer may be a good video player, but xine is a *useful* video player.

Re:For Windows at least- BSplayer instead

[ADRA]

On my Windows based TV computer:
Choice: Media Player Classic (MPC)
Reasoning:

1. I've never had CPU issues playing video, so I can't say that program X or program Y are more efficient.

2. Feature for feature, I've never seen any players with as many abilities as MPC. If you're leet and wanna dabble with the decoders, they let you do all kinds of thing with DirectShow. They accelerate output on DX9, The inbound codecs can be anyones. I use ffdshow, MPC, or even the official vendor codecs for things like format decoding/splitting/etc. I have the control to rewire them at my leasure if I like one over another. My experience with DVD playback is flawless.

3. Configuration is easy and straight forward for those that know how to use it. For those that don't, the default installation (with 3rd party directshow codecs installed) requires no config.

The only reservation I have with it is that sometimes I notice a cleaner picture with the powerdvd filters and I hate mapping the powerdvd filters into MPC to play it just to switch back later.

Say what you will about hating windows based technologies, but once I've tuned to my likes, it works amazingly well and I can't think of any platform media player / tech that I like more than MPC / DirectShow.

Re:What is happening to the Mac OS X port?

[evilviper]

It's now 8 months later and not even a dev CVS build.

There was a major hardware failure, which took down the main server for several months. Development has continued on CVS, and you can grab a snapshot any time you wish. This hasn't just stopped OS X development. If you were a bit more observant, you'd see there haven't been new releases on the server for ANY architecture for nearly a year.

There are at least 2 MPlayer devs with PPC/OS X machines, who continue to find and fix bugs. I'm sure you'll see new OS X releases soon.

You are talking about two issues.

[Ayanami Rei]

BSPlayer does not link or bundle in a full ffdshow library. It can leverage the ffdshow DirectShow filter to play a lot of media types without using other WM/DS libraries (people often prefer the features of ffdshow in MPEG2/MPEG4 over filters bundled with DVD drives and/or DivX). Usually you find BSPlayer and FFDShow bundled together, for example, in the KLite Codec Pack.

However, BSPlayer is a much better parser of video container formats (ASF, WMV, AVI, OGM) and MPEG transport streams than most other players out there (maybe with the exception of VLC). All of them are better than any versions Windows Media Player. :-/

So it can handle broken, badly indexed, or partially downloaded files with ease.
Additionally, like VLC, mplayer and MPC, it can handle extended features in video containers that many other players (Windows Media Player included) omit. For example, multiple video streams, subtitles, multiple audio tracks, etc.

Re:Is mplayer relevant?

[evilviper]

Under what circumstances?

Under absolutely ALL circumstances. MPlayer has been heavily optimized for speed, while XINE hasn't. I've never before seen ANYONE claim Xine was EVER faster.

If you're actually seeing something like that, and not just trolling, either you got a poorly made binary package, or you were doing something like using the wrong output method for your system.

Some defective AVIs and VOBs I played on Xine, but made MPlayer hang.

Also something I have NEVER heard from ANYONE, ANYWHERE. MPlayer is much more tolerant of errors, and will play far more media types. If you're seeing some bug, you should report it, and perhaps provide a sample.

XVideo and ALSA is all you need. ;-) No seriously, for most users, this should not be an issue.

vidix is faster than XV in just about all cases. gl is faster if your drivers have OpenGL support, and MUCH, MUCH, MUCH faster on HD material.

svga/fbdev support makes it possible to play videos even without X11 installed, and can be faster in some cases.

> Doesn't have a fraction of the great video/audio filters that MPlayer does.

see MEncoder comment.

No, I'm not just talking about encoding. Good inverse telecine filters are absolutely necessary in the US and other NTSC countries. There are plenty of other filters like overlays for interactive on-screen graphic interfaces (eg. Freevo), filters to fix videos which have been improperly encoded, like deinterlacing telecined content, numerous postprocessing filters, filters to remove TV station logos, etc.

Re:When will it stop segfaulting?

[jlarocco]

For starters, mplayer.c is 4000 lines long. Apparently only one man really knows what's going on in there, and he's not taking a look at it. Making sense of it was beyond what my cursory overview of the code could muster. Near as I could tell most of it was written to deal with bugs.

You've got to be kidding? I was skeptical of your post, so I looked at the mplayer source. After 10-15 minutes of looking at mplayer.c, I think I have a fairly good idea of what most of it is doing. There's a lot of stuff for portability, but it's definitly not mostly written to deal with bugs.

The main developers are from eastern europe, I think. They have a pechant for three letter variables, and not a character over. Terse and unreadable code is also preferred. I remember being asked why I dond't compress a three line, readable piece of code into a once liner, line noise version. Comments have long since passed into myth. I sometimes wondered if their compilers supported them.

Yeah, cryptic, three character variable names like "osd_show_percentage", "stream_dump_type", "too_fast_frame_cnt" and "frame_time_remaining". How cryptic! Whatever could those mean?!?

The mplayer system is based on plugins. Written in c code that is hacked to the limit to introduce, insofar as it is possible, object orientation into c. Void pointers abound, and are probably the most common datatype in the respository.

Bullshit. I just checked. mplayer.c has 3 pointers to void, and one pointer to pointer of void. A quick search through some other files found zero void pointers. The code in the loader section does have a few, but it's hardly the most common datatype.

The only part of your post that's even remotely true is "All that said, the program is fantastic." On that we agree. mplayer kicks ass.