MPlayer

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This article is about the open source media player. For Microsoft's media player, whose filename is mplayer2.exe, see the Windows Media Player article. For the online gaming community, see MPlayer.com

{{Infobox_Software2 | name = MPlayer | logo = Image:MPlayer.png | screenshot = Image:MPlayerScreenShot.jpg | caption = MPlayer screenshot | developer = MPlayer team | operating_system = Cross-platform | genre = Media player | license = GPL | website = www.mplayerhq.hu | }} MPlayer is a free media player with support for more multimedia formats than any other media player. Some of the supported formats include:

Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs
Container formats: 3gp, AVI, ASF, Matroska, MOV, MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia
Video codecs: 3ivx, Cinepak, DivX, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, RealVideo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV, XviD
Audio codecs: AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, MP3, RealAudio, Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA

MPlayer also supports a variety of different output drivers for displaying video, including X11, DirectX, Quartz Compositor, VESA, SDL and fancy ones like ASCII art and Blinkenlights.

MPlayer can play all common types of streams available over the internet and save them to a file.

The program runs on all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Windows and Mac OS X.

MPlayer is distributed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License. It used to be called "MPlayer - The Movie Player for Linux", but now that it supports many operating systems besides Linux this was shortened to "MPlayer - The Movie Player".

MPlayer is primarily a command line application with an optional GUI (GMPlayer) that runs under the X Window System. MPlayer OS X is a GUI for Mac OS X and WinMPLauncher is a GUI for Microsoft Windows. Several alternative GUI frontends for all platforms are available.

Most video and audio codecs are supported natively through the libavcodec library of the FFmpeg project. For those codecs where no open source decoder has been implemented yet MPlayer relies on binary codecs. It can even use Windows DLLs directly with the help of a DLL loader forked from avifile (which itself forked its loader from the Wine project).

The combination of CSS decryption software, Windows codec use, implementation of codecs covered by software patents, and the GPL places a fully-functional MPlayer in the legal bind shared by all open source multimedia players. In the past MPlayer used to include OpenDivX, a GPL-incompatible decoder library. Partly for this reason, it has yet to be admitted to the Debian distribution of Linux.

Development of MPlayer began in 2000. The original author, Árpád Gereöffy, was soon joined by many other programmers. In the beginning most developers were from Hungary, but nowadays the developers come from all over the world. Alex Beregszászi has maintained MPlayer since 2003 when Árpád Gereöffy left MPlayer development to begin work on a second generation MPlayer. The MPlayer G2 project is currently paused for a number of reasons.

A companion program, the movie encoder MEncoder, can take an audio or video file in one of the formats listed above and can encode it in several different formats, optionally applying various transforms along the way.

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