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<bookinfo id="toc">
<title><application>MPlayer</application> - The Movie Player</title>
<subtitle><ulink url="http://www.mplayerhq.hu"></ulink></subtitle>
<date>March 24, 2003</date>
<copyright>
  <year>2000</year>
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  <year>2021</year>
  <year>2022</year>
  <year>2023</year>
  <year>2024</year>
  <year>2025</year>
  <holder>MPlayer team</holder>
</copyright>
<legalnotice>
  <title>License</title>
  <para>MPlayer is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as
  published by the Free Software Foundation.</para>

  <para>MPlayer is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
  WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
  or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
  for more details.</para>

  <para>You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  along with MPlayer; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
  Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.</para>
</legalnotice>
</bookinfo>


<preface id="howtoread">
<title>How to read this documentation</title>

<para>
If you are a first-time installer: be sure to read everything from here to
the end of the Installation section, and follow the links you will find. If
you have any other questions, return to the <link linkend="toc">Table of
Contents</link> and search for the topic, read the <xref linkend="faq"/>,
or try grepping through the files. Most questions should be answered somewhere
here and the rest has probably already been asked on our
<ulink url="http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/mailing_lists.html">mailing lists</ulink>.
Check the
<ulink url="https://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo">archives</ulink>, there
is a lot of valuable information to be found there.
</para>
</preface>


<chapter id="intro">
<title>Introduction</title>

<para>
<application>MPlayer</application> is a movie player for Linux (runs on
many other Unices, and non-x86 CPUs, see <xref linkend="ports"/>).
It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM,
NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, PVA, Matroska files, supported by
many native, XAnim, RealPlayer, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch
Video CD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, RealMedia, Sorenson, Theora,
and MPEG-4 (DivX) movies, too. Another big
feature of <application>MPlayer</application> is the wide range of
supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib,
fbdev, AAlib, libcaca, DirectFB, but you can use GGI and SDL (and this way all
their drivers) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and
Radeon, Mach64, Permedia3) too! Most of them support software or hardware
scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen.
<application>MPlayer</application> supports displaying through some
hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the <link linkend="dvb">DVB</link> and
<link linkend="dxr3">DXR3/Hollywood+</link>. And what about the nice big
antialiased shaded subtitles (14 supported types)
with European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic, Korean
fonts, and the onscreen display (OSD)?
</para>

<para>
The player is rock solid playing damaged MPEG files (useful for some VCDs),
and it plays bad AVI files which are unplayable with the famous
<application>Windows Media Player</application>.
Even AVI files without index chunk are playable, and you can
temporarily rebuild their indexes with the <option>-idx</option> option, or
permanently with <application>MEncoder</application>, thus enabling
seeking!  As you see, stability and quality are the most important things,
but the speed is also amazing. There is also a powerful filter system for
video and audio manipulation.
</para>

<para>
<application>MEncoder</application> (<application>MPlayer</application>'s Movie
Encoder) is a simple movie encoder, designed to encode
<application>MPlayer</application>-playable movies
AVI/ASF/OGG/DVD/VCD/VOB/MPG/MOV/VIV/FLI/RM/NUV/NET/PVA
to other <application>MPlayer</application>-playable formats (see below).
It can encode with various codecs, like MPEG-4 (DivX4)
(one or two passes), <systemitem class="library">libavcodec</systemitem>,
PCM/MP3/VBR MP3 audio.
</para>

<itemizedlist>
<title><application>MEncoder</application> features</title>
<listitem><para>
  Encoding from the wide range of file formats and decoders of
  <application>MPlayer</application>
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  Encoding to all the codecs of FFmpeg's
  <systemitem class="library">libavcodec</systemitem>
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  Video encoding from V4L compatible TV tuners
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  Encoding/multiplexing to interleaved AVI files with proper index
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  Creating files from external audio stream
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  1, 2 or 3 pass encoding
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  VBR MP3 audio
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  PCM audio
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  Stream copying
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  Input A/V synchronizing (pts-based, can be disabled with
  <option>-mc 0</option> option)
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  fps correction with <option>-ofps</option> option (useful when encoding
  30000/1001 fps VOB to 24000/1001 fps AVI)
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  Using our very powerful filter system (crop, expand, flip, postprocess,
  rotate, scale, RGB/YUV conversion)
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  Can encode DVD/VOBsub and text subtitles
  into the output file
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
  Can rip DVD subtitles to VOBsub format
</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>

<para>
<application>MPlayer</application> and <application>MEncoder</application>
can be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2.
</para>

</chapter>
