Table of Contents
MPlayer
MPlayer is a small, fast and lightweight, cross-platform Open Source media player (with focus on Video). It is able to play many different formats without requiring additional codecs. In general, it is a command line player and tool (but there are GUIs, for sure).
Installation
Ubuntu
10.04 Lucid and above
Simply install the following package(s):
mplayer
(multiverse)
After installation, you can start the program on the command line via mplayer
.
There are some additional packages, providing special functionality:
mplayer-skin-blue
(multiverse) – Recommended default GUI. If installed, you can start the program by clicking “Applications→Sound & Video→GNOME MPlayer”.gecko-mediaplayer
(multiverse) – Plugin to use MPlayer for playing videos within Firefox.1)mplayer-fonts
(multiverse) – Additional fonts for subtitles and the On-Screen-Display (OSD)mplayer-doc
(multiverse) – Offline Documentation in English.
Windows
XP and above
Simply download the Windows installer (→“Binaries”) and execute it with administrator privileges. The binary “MPlayer SVN Windows with SMPlayer GUI” is recommended for common usage cause it ships MPlayer with a useful GUI. “MPlayer SVN Windows” brings the command line tool only.
Tips and tricks
Download video streams
Open a terminal and run mplayer
with the -dumpstream
and -dumpfile
parameter. Example:
mplayer mms://example.com/stream.wmv -dumpstream -dumpfile ~/local-path-where-you-want-to-store-example.wmv
This should work for all supported streaming formats.