Comprehensive MPlayer Guide I: Introduction
This article is meant as a comprehensive guide to acquire a complete multimedia experience, in particular everything that is video related: from installation and playback to encoding, desktop integration and much more . I will try to give an in-dept but understandable explanation of the how and perhaps more importantly, the why. I will not use a distro specific approach. The instructions apply to every linux distribution.
The guide includes 4 major sections:
- Introduction
- Installation
- Video Playback & Desktop Integration
- Video Encoding
of which this is the first section: the introduction.
There are a lot of video players at hand. I’m going to use MPlayer, but why’s that?. MPlayer is by far the best multimedia player for linux. Not only does it handle video and audio content perfectly, it’s also capable of playing streams and integrates nicely in your browser. It even supports video hardware acceleration for those with a recent video card. Yes, there are some alternatives like VLC, but none are as flexible as MPlayer. You can easily determine which codecs should be enabled and which not. You’re not stuck with one gui. There are multiple guis available for several platforms. No matter what environment you are using, there’s a solution for every one of them.
Another thing that stands out is MEncoder. MEncoder is a part of MPlayer and is a tool to easily encode audio, video and extract subtitles. Everything you ever needed for encoding media is included in this application. Combining MPlayer and MEncoder make the perfect multimedia application.
The follow-up, Comprehensive MPlayer Guide II: Installation is now available.