Welcome to MPlayer, The Movie Player. MPlayer can play most standard videoformats out of the box and almost all others with the help of external codecs.MPlayer currently works best from the command line, but visual feedback formany functions is available from its onscreen status display (OSD), which isalso used for displaying subtitles. MPlayer also has a GUI with skin support andseveral unofficial alternative graphical frontends are available.MEncoder is a command line video encoder for advanced users that can be builtfrom the MPlayer source tree. Unofficial graphical frontends exist but arenot included.This document is for getting you started in a few minutes. It cannot answer allof your questions. If you have problems, please read the documentation inDOCS/HTML/en/index.html, which should help you solve most of your problems.Also read the man page to learn how to use MPlayer.Requirements:- You need a working development environment that can compile programs. On popular Linux distributions, this means having the glibc development package(s) installed.- To compile MPlayer with X11 support, you need to have the X Window System development packages (like for XFree86 or X.Org) installed.- For the GUI you need the GTK development packages.Before you start...Make sure that your version of X has Xvideo support, without it even veryfast machines may not be able to properly play high resolution videos infullscreen mode. Consult DOCS/HTML/en/video.html for details. There you mayalso find out about special card-specific video output drivers that can yieldoptimal performance.______________________STEP0: Getting MPlayer~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Official releases and Subversion snapshots, as well as binary codec packagesand a number of different skins for the GUI are available from the downloadsection of our homepage at http://www.mplayerhq.hu/dload.htmlThe GUI needs at least one skin and codec packages add support for some morevideo and audio formats. MPlayer does not come with any of these by default,you have to download and install them separately.You can also get MPlayer via Subversion. Issue the following commands to getthe latest sources: svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayerA directory named 'mplayer' will be created. It will include all necessaryFFmpeg libraries, you don't need to get them separately as was the case inthe past. You can later update your sources by saying svn updatefrom within that directory._______________________________STEP1: Installing Binary Codecs~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~MPlayer has builtin support for the most common audio and video formats. For afew formats no native decoder exists and external binary codecs are requiredto handle them, for example newer RealVideo variants and a variety of uncommonformats. This step is not mandatory, but recommended for getting MPlayer toplay a broader range of formats. Please note that binary codecs only work onthe processor architecture they were compiled for.Unpack the codecs archives and put the contents in a directory where MPlayerwill find them. The default directory is /usr/local/lib/codecs/ (it used to be/usr/local/lib/win32 in the past, this also works) but you can change that tosomething else by passing the '--codecsdir' option to './configure'.__________________________STEP2: Configuring MPlayer~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~MPlayer can be adapted to all kinds of needs and hardware environments. Run ./configureto configure MPlayer with the default options. GUI support has to be enabledseparately, run ./configure --enable-guiif you want to use the GUI.If something does not work as expected, try ./configure --helpto see the available options and select what you need.The configure script prints a summary of enabled and disabled options. If youhave something installed that configure fails to detect, check the fileconfigure.log for errors and reasons for the failure. Repeat this step untilyou are satisfied with the enabled feature set.________________________STEP3: Compiling MPlayer~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Now you can start the compilation by typing makeYou can install MPlayer with make installprovided that you have write permission in the installation directory.If all went well, you can run MPlayer by typing 'mplayer'. A help screen with asummary of the most common options and keyboard shortcuts should be displayed.If you get 'unable to load shared library' or similar errors, run'ldd ./mplayer' to check which libraries fail and go back to STEP 3 to fix it.Sometimes running 'ldconfig' is enough to fix the problem.NOTE: If you run Debian you can configure, compile and build a proper Debian.deb package with only one command: fakeroot debian/rules binaryIf you want to pass custom options to configure, you can set up theDEB_BUILD_OPTIONS environment variable. For instance, if you want GUIand OSD menu support you would use: DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="--enable-gui --enable-menu" fakeroot debian/rules binaryYou can also pass some variables to the Makefile. For example, if you wantto compile with gcc 3.4 even if it's not the default compiler: CC=gcc-3.4 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="--enable-gui" fakeroot debian/rules binaryTo clean up the source tree run the following command: fakeroot debian/rules clean______________________________________STEP4: Choose an onscreen display font~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~You can use any TrueType font installed on your system. Just pass '-font/path/to/font.ttf' on the command line or add 'font=/path/to/font.ttf' toyour configuration file. The manual page has more details. Alternativelyyou can create a symbolic link from either ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf or/usr/local/share/mplayer/subfont.ttf to your TrueType font.____________________________STEP5: Installing a GUI skin~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Unpack the archive and put the contents in /usr/local/share/mplayer/skins/ or~/.mplayer/skins/. MPlayer will use the skin in the subdirectory named defaultof /usr/local/share/mplayer/skins/ or ~/.mplayer/skins/ unless told otherwisevia the '-skin' switch. You should therefore rename your skin subdirectory ormake a suitable symbolic link.__________________STEP6: Let's play!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~That's it for the moment. To start playing movies, open a command line and try mplayer <moviefile>or for the GUI gmplayer <moviefile>gmplayer is a symbolic link to mplayer created by 'make install'.Without <moviefile>, gmplayer will start with the GUI filepicker.To play a VCD track or a DVD title, try: mplayer vcd://2 -cdrom-device /dev/hdc mplayer dvd://1 -alang en -slang hu -dvd-device /dev/hddSee 'mplayer -help' and 'man mplayer' for further options.'mplayer -vo help' will show you the available video output drivers. Experimentwith the '-vo' switch to see which one gives you the best performance.If you get jerky playback or no sound, experiment with the '-ao' switch (see'-ao help') to choose between different audio drivers. Note that jerky playbackis caused by buggy audio drivers or a slow processor and video card. With agood audio and video driver combination, one can play DVDs and 720x576 MPEG-4files smoothly on a Celeron 366. Slower systems may need the '-framedrop'option.Questions you may have are probably answered in the rest of the documentation.The places to start reading are the man page, DOCS/HTML/en/index.html andDOCS/HTML/en/faq.html. If you find a bug, please report it, but first readDOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html.