MPlayer is a powerful and versatile media player that can play all types of free media formats

(see the FreeFormats page) as well as most 'non-free' media formats. A companion program
called MEncoder can be used to encode or transform any audio or video stream that MPlayer can
read. See the Medibuntu wiki page for instructions about enabling support for encrypted DVD
playback and non-native media formats in MPlayer and gmplayer. For more information visit the
MPlayer web site.

Installing MPlayer
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) and later
Beginning with Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake, you no longer need to match your CPU to the proper
MPlayer package.
Simply install the mplayer package from the Multiverse repository.

Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device

If you encounter this problem, you much likley have desktop effects activated, and OpenGL runs
your desktop. To change the selected vo device, right click anywhere on the mplayer control
window (where the play and pause buttons etc are). Select "precerences", then "Video"-tab and
change driver to "gl2". Restart mplayer and see if it helps. You can try different drivers to get
better performance.

Streaming Video
MPlayer provides excellent streaming video support for Mozilla, Firefox, Epiphany and
Konqueror. To enable support for streaming media install the package mozilla-mplayer.
[Edgy / Feisty] Firefox prefers the totem-mozilla plugin over mozilla-mplayer, so you will
need to remove the package totem-mozilla to enable the mplayer plugin.

Tips Tricks & Techniques

Audio Video Syncing on FLV files

To correct problems of audio and video being out of sync, edit or create the file
~/.mplayer/config. Then add this text as a line anywhere in the file:

mc=0

Supported Audio and Video Codecs

Supported video codecs include:

o MPEG-1 (VCD) and MPEG-2 (SVCD/DVD/DVB) video
o

MPEG-4 SP/ASP (for example, encoded with DivX, XviD or FFmpeg MPEG-4)

H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC)

Windows Media Video 7/8/9 (WMV1/2/3)

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

Intel Indeo 2, 3 (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

Supported audio codecs include:

o

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: SIPRO (using Real libraries)

RealAudio: DNET, Cooker, ATRAC3 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