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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!-- $Revision$ -->

<bookinfo id="toc">
<title><application>MPlayer</application> - The Movie Player</title>
<subtitle><ulink url="http://www.mplayerhq.hu"></ulink></subtitle>
<date>March 24, 2003</date>
<copyright>
  <year>2000</year>
  <year>2001</year>
  <year>2002</year>
  <year>2003</year>
  <year>2004</year>
  <holder>MPlayer team</holder>
</copyright>
<!--
<legalnotice>
  <title>License</title>
  <para>This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
  Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
  option) any later version.</para>

  <para>This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
  WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
  or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
  for more details.</para>

  <para>You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
  Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA, 02111-1307, USA.</para>
</legalnotice>
-->
</bookinfo>


<preface id="howtoread">
<title>How to read this documentation</title>

<para>
If you are a first-time installer: be sure to read everything from here to
the end of the Installation section, and follow the links you will find. If
you have any other questions, return to the <link linkend="toc">Table of
Contents</link> and search for the topic, read the <xref linkend="faq"/>,
or try grepping through the files. Most questions should be answered somewhere
here and the rest has probably already been asked on our
<link linkend="mailinglists">mailing lists</link>.  Check the
<ulink url="http://www.mplayerhq.hu/cgi-bin/s-arch.cgi">archives</ulink>, there
is a lot of valuable information to be found there.
</para>
</preface>


<chapter id="intro">
<title>Introduction</title>

<para>
<application>MPlayer</application> is a movie player for Linux (runs on
many other Unices, and <emphasis role="bold">non-x86</emphasis> CPUs, see
<xref linkend="ports"/>). It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, OGG/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV,
QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, PVA, Matroska files, supported by
many native, XAnim, RealPlayer, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch
<emphasis role="bold">VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, RealMedia, Sorenson, Theora</emphasis>, and
<emphasis role="bold">MPEG4 (DivX)</emphasis> movies too. Another big
feature of <application>MPlayer</application> is the wide range of
supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib,
fbdev, AAlib, libcaca, DirectFB, but you can use GGI and SDL (and this way all
their drivers) and some lowlevel card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and
Radeon, Mach64, Permedia3) too! Most of them supports software or hardware
scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen.
<application>MPlayer</application> supports displaying through some
hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the <link linkend="dvb">DVB</link> and
<link linkend="dxr3">DXR3/Hollywood+</link>. And what about the nice big
antialiased shaded subtitles (<emphasis role="bold">14 supported types</emphasis>)
with European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic, Korean
fonts, and the onscreen display (OSD)?
</para>

<para>
The player is rock solid playing damaged MPEG files (useful for some VCDs),
and it plays bad AVI files which are unplayable with the famous windows
media player. Even AVI files without index chunk are playable, and you can
temporarily rebuild their indexes with the <option>-idx</option> option, or
permanently with <application>MEncoder</application>, thus enabling
seeking!  As you see, stability and quality are the most important things,
but the speed is also amazing. There is also a powerful filter system for
video and audio manipulation.
</para>

<para>
<application>MEncoder</application> (<application>MPlayer</application>'s Movie
Encoder) is a simple movie encoder, designed to encode
<application>MPlayer</application>-playable movies
(<emphasis role="bold">AVI/ASF/OGG/DVD/VCD/VOB/MPG/MOV/VIV/FLI/RM/NUV/NET/PVA</emphasis>)
to other <application>MPlayer</application>-playable formats (see below). It
can encode with various codecs, like <emphasis role="bold">MPEG4 (DivX4)</emphasis>
(1 or 2 passes), <systemitem class="library">libavcodec</systemitem>,
<emphasis role="bold">PCM/MP3/VBR MP3</emphasis>
audio.
</para>


<itemizedlist>
<title><application>MEncoder</application> features</title>
<listitem><simpara>
  Encoding from the wide range of fileformats and decoders of
  <application>MPlayer</application>
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Encoding to all the codecs of FFmpeg's
  <link linkend="ffmpeg"><systemitem class="library">libavcodec</systemitem></link>
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Video encoding from <emphasis role="bold">V4L compatible TV tuners</emphasis>
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Encoding/multiplexing to interleaved AVI files with proper index
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Creating files from external audio stream
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  1, 2 or 3 pass encoding
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  <emphasis role="bold">VBR</emphasis> MP3 audio
  <important><simpara>
  VBR MP3 audio doesn't always play nicely on windows players!
  </simpara></important>
  </para></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  PCM audio
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Stream copying
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Input A/V synchronizing (PTS-based, can be disabled with
  <option>-mc 0</option> option)
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  FPS correction with <option>-ofps</option> option (useful when encoding
  29.97 fps VOB to 24 fps AVI)
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Using our very powerful filter system (crop, expand, flip, postprocess,
  rotate, scale, rgb/yuv conversion)
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Can encode DVD/VOBsub <emphasis role="bold">AND</emphasis> text subtitles
  into the output file
  </simpara></listitem>
<listitem><simpara>
  Can rip DVD subtitles to VOBsub format
  </simpara></listitem>
</itemizedlist>

<itemizedlist>
<title>Planned features</title>
<listitem><simpara>
  Even wider variety of available en/decoding formats/codecs
  (creating VOB files with DivX4/Indeo5/VIVO streams :).
  </simpara></listitem>
</itemizedlist>

<!-- FIXME: the license should be in bookinfo -->
<para>
<application>MPlayer</application> and <application>MEncoder</application>
can be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2.
</para>

&history.xml;
&install.xml;
</chapter>


&features.xml;
&usage.xml;
&faq.xml;
&cd-dvd.xml;
&ports.xml;
&mencoder.xml;
&mail-lists.xml;
&bugreports.xml;
&bugs.xml;
&skin.xml;
&users-vs-dev.xml;
&patches.xml;