MPlayer

MPlayer is a standing under the GNU GPL license media player. It is particularly distinguished by its broad file format and platform compatibility.

Thus, the program runs alongside Linux, the operating system of its origin, on Windows, Mac OS X, DOS / FreeDOS, FreeBSD, MorphOS, OS / 2 and many other platforms. It supports a variety of video and audio codecs, including platform- exclusive, whereby about Windows Media can also be played outside of Windows. In addition, it supports DVB. A special fault tolerance allows the multiple award-winning player to play even damaged files. Another strength is the absence of any installation so that MPlayer does not conflict with already installed codecs and is very easy as the output program (English: " viewer" ) can be integrated into other programs.

Construction

MPlayer is command-line oriented. Optional is a graphical user interface, as well as MEncoder, a program that can convert all playable files and data streams into other formats, such as MPEG-1 to MPEG-4.

The program itself uses when starting back on his brought format library from which a suitable decoding algorithm is searched. This reservoir is based on FFmpeg's libavcodec to their programming developers from the MPlayer Project are involved, as well as a number of other, mostly exotic codecs. It is also possible to use binary codecs to play proprietary formats such as 32-bit Windows DLLs and Mac OS libraries.

License

The binary codecs used in the program are royalty legally highly controversial in the open source scene. The GPL explicitly requires that, in the transmission of the program, the full source code must be included, which is not possible when standing under this License programs are mixed with proprietary. A user or distribution may thus MPlayer not redistribute, without violating the GPL. The developers disagree vehemently that interpretation of the license. These codecs are only available as separate packages for download (essential or all ) and are not required for the operation of MPlayer.

Related Projects

There are a number of projects that are based on the source code from MPlayer. Some of them develop alternative user interfaces ( such as the Gnome MPlayer SMPlayer or ), based on different libraries (such as Qt and GTK ), others develop browser plug -ins or MPlayer ported to Xbox ( XBMC ) and Amiga. The distribution MoviX contains a bootable Linux including MPlayer and burn it to a CD with the film. The Fork MPlayerXP emerged for a technical discussion on the topic of software multithreading when decoding video data.