Ever got frustrated by your media player not able to play your media files whether its Audio or Video files, i think almost most of you have faced with this situation one time or another.Also tons of players are there for playing this format or that.But none of them are able to play every format.Well before i talk more about problems i wana just talk about why you cant play all media formats with a single player.All media files are made with help of some or other media codecs and for playing that particular file you need the decoders .Thats why any player cant play all the files.So you may think whats the difference with Mplayer compared to others.

MPlayer is a movie player which plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies.

Another great feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too! Most of them support software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen. MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the Siemens DVB, DXR2 and DXR3/Hollywood+.

MPlayer has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls. European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic and Korean fonts are supported along with 12 subtitle formats (MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS and our own: MPsub). DVD subtitles (SPU streams, VOBsub and Closed Captions) are supported as well.

MPlayer is available under the GNU General Public License version 2. It is not available under any other licensing terms. If you have questions about the GNU GPL, consult the GPL FAQ.

Supported Input Formats

  • (S)VCD (Super Video CD)
  • CDRwin’s .bin image file
  • DVD, including encrypted DVD
  • MPEG-1/2 (ES/PS/PES/VOB)
  • RIFF AVI file format
  • ASF/WMV/WMA format
  • QT/MOV/MP4 format
  • RealAudio/RealVideo format
  • Ogg/OGM files
  • Matroska
  • NUT
  • NSV (Nullsoft Streaming Video)
  • VIVO format
  • FLI format
  • NuppelVideo format
  • yuv4mpeg format
  • FILM (.cpk) format
  • RoQ format
  • PVA format
  • streaming via HTTP/FTP, RTP/RTSP, MMS/MMST, MPST, SDP
  • TV grabbing

Supported Video and Audio Codecs

most important video codecs:

  • MPEG-1 (VCD) and MPEG-2 (SVCD/DVD/DVB) video
  • MPEG-4 ASP in all variants including DivX ;-), OpenDivX (DivX4), DivX 5 (Pro), Xvid
  • MPEG-4 AVC aka H.264
  • Windows Media Video 7/8 (WMV1/2)
  • Windows Media Video 9 (WMV3) (using x86 DLL)
  • RealVideo 1.0, 2.0 (G2)
  • RealVideo 3.0 (RP8), 4.0 (RP9) (using Real libraries)
  • Sorenson v1/v3 (SVQ1/SVQ3), Cinepak, RPZA and other QuickTime codecs
  • DV video
  • 3ivx
  • Intel Indeo3 (3.1, 3.2)
  • Intel Indeo 4.1 and 5.0 (using x86 DLL or XAnim codecs)
  • VIVO 1.0, 2.0, I263 and other H.263(+) variants (using x86 DLL)
  • MJPEG, AVID, VCR2, ASV2 and other hardware formats
  • FLI/FLC
  • HuffYUV
  • various old simple RLE-like formats

most important audio codecs:

  • MPEG layer 1, 2, and 3 (MP3) audio
  • AC3/A52 (Dolby Digital) audio (software or SP/DIF)
  • AAC (MPEG-4 audio)
  • WMA (DivX Audio) v1, v2
  • WMA 9 (WMAv3), Voxware audio, ACELP.net etc (using x86 DLLs)
  • RealAudio: COOK, SIPRO, ATRAC3 (using Real libraries)
  • RealAudio: DNET and older codecs
  • QuickTime: Qclp, Q-Design QDMC/QDM2, MACE 3/6 (using QT libraries), ALAC
  • Ogg Vorbis audio
  • VIVO audio (g723, Vivo Siren) (using x86 DLL)
  • alaw/ulaw, (ms)gsm, pcm, *adpcm and other simple old audio formats

Earlier Mplayer was just a command line player but now its with full GUI (Graphical user interface) and hence much easier for many of you.As i said earlier, its open source and hence you need not worry much about licenses.

You can download the GUI version for windows here which is SMPLAYER