Documentation

Contents

Introduction

Those who don't know the gratest media player ever, visit mplayer homepage: http://www.mplayerhq.hu

Unfortunately, this player is mainly for Linux systems, Windows port lacks the graphical user interface. Operating a media player from command line is not so good, so I wrote a frontend (inspired by Smerli) to ease your job! The only thing you should do is to download the latest version, install it and use it! You don't have to install ANY codec-s, as this player already contains almost everything.

Features

Here are some features of the MPF frontend I wrote:

• You can drag&drop files onto the window
• Accepts commandline filename, so can be associated with movie files
• playlist with subtitles
• Shutdown system after play
• Normalize volume, extra stereo
• Brightness, contrast, etc. control
• Can open subtitles even from a ZIP file
• Subtitle font and size can be adjusted
• PanScan emulation, Expand mode (make subtitles and osd appear on the black stripes under/above film)
• ...and more

And some features of MPlayer itself:

• Can play almost every media file!!!
• No codec needed!!!
• Very fast playing (on my 850Mhz celeron consumes about 20-30% CPU avarage)
• Great picture quality
• INSTANT SEEKING
• ...and much, much more... take a look at mplayer homepage

Requirements

• Operating system: Windows 98/Me, Windows 2000/XP and later
• Video card: Any videocard :) Card with YV12 or YUY2 hardware overlay support preferred
• Sound card: Any soundcard that can do 44kHz 16bit Stereo
• Codecs: No codecs needed :)
• Other: DirectX 7 needed for DirectX video output, hardware accelarated OpenGL 1.2 for OpenGL video output. DirectX 5 needed for SDL output. Note that DirectX output is the default, as this performs the best.

Setup

Setting up the program is very easy: simply download and run the installer file. After installation it should work fine.

There are many options included in the program. Most options are self-explanatory, for the rest there is a readme installed along with MPF. You can access this file by clicking on the Read me! button on the main window.

In case your language is supported or you have downloaded a language file the program language can be set. Open the settings panel by clicking on the Settings button, select the Misc tab and there you can switch language.

Configuration files

On start, MPF tries to read mpf.ini, equalizer.ini and playlist files from the user's home directory. If a file is not found there then it is loaded from the directory where MPF is installed. Upon exit, MPF tries to save these files to the same location from where they are loaded. If a file - loaded from the MPF directory - cannot be saved (ie. you have no rights to write to that directory) then they will be saved into the user's home directory. If MPF uses a user-dependent configuration file, it will not use the main file.

Codecs

MPlayer does not need any codec. Indeed it will not use any codecs installed. However it can play a great number of formats. If you find that a certain movie is unsupported by mplayer, than you should try downloading the mplayer codec pack from the homesite. These codecs are specially for mplayer, so other movie players won't use them, and of course the system won't be messed up. You have to uncompress the contents of the codec pack archive into the directory <installed path>/mplayer/codecs, mplayer will use it automatically.

Usually recent QuickTime, RealVideo or WMV movies need this option.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter any error please read the output of MPlayer to see the reason of the error. If the result window did not appear press F11 to get it. If MPlayer cannot play the movie because it does not know the file format you may try downloading the codec pack from the MPlayer homesite. More info in section Codecs. Another common error is that some older videocards do not support the colorspace required (usually YV12). There might be a solution: try switching YUY2 or Direct rendering or Double buffer on the settings panel. And again: please read the readme file it may help you!

If everything is wrong then please send the full mplayer output (write -v in the mplayer parameters box) to the mplayer windows mailing list: mplayer-cygwin at mplayerhq dot hu