Version: 1.5
Web: http://mplayerhq.hu
Recently there’s been an update to Mplayer, the video player for Linux and beyond. We settled down to read the changelog for version 1.5, but to be honest the changes aren’t particularly ground breaking. There are some changes in the set of decoders, the code has been cleaned up, there’s better localisation support (the GUI finally respects your locale!), and the new default skin enables you to run the Mplayer GUI even if there aren’t any skins installed.
Mplayer 1.5 does a fairly good job of playing various types of audio and video content. It includes a modern version of Ffmpeg 5 and adds some more drivers and codecs on top of it. Mplayer also provides its own CLI converter known as Mencoder. Obviously, transcoding any media file means writing a long command with several input and output arguments, which you may want to avoid by using some sort of a graphical transcoder such as Handbrake (see LXF259). However, it doesn’t take long to get used to both Mplayer and Mencoder and in return you’ll have access to robust and feature-rich playing and encoding capabilities.