mplayer tricks

mplayer is my favourite movie player for Linux by far, but the thousands-of-lines long manual page can be a little daunting. Here I've compiled a list of some options that you may or may not know, that I find useful in day-to-day movie playing.

-cache 8192

Sets the cache (buffer) size to 8192 kilobytes. Useful when playing over a network connection that occasionally hiccups, like mine.

-fs

Start fullscreen playback right away. Especially useful when playing multiple movies in a single command, to prevent dropping back to windowed mode at each new movie.

-monitoraspect 16:10

If your monitor has non-sqare pixels (e.g. 1280 by 1024 on a 4:3 monitor), you can specify the physical aspect ratio of your monitor in this way.

-ao alsa

Use ALSA for sound playback. Should be the default in any decent distro, but in case it doesn't work, try this (or, heaven forbid, -ao oss).

-nolirc

Disable LIRC support. Gets rid of the annoying “Failed to open LIRC support.” message.

-subfont-text-scale 3

The default subtitle size is 5, but I prefer mine to be a little smaller.

-aspect 4:3

Overrides the aspect ratio of the movie. Some useful values are 4:3, 16:9 and 2.35.

-vf cropdetect

For movies with black bars around them. This detects the black bars in the image and prints out the correct argument to crop them off, such as-vf crop=656:288:0:0. One of mplayer's coolest features.

Options can also be put into a file ~/.mplayer/config if you leave out the initial - and replace spaces by = characters (e.g. monitoraspect=16:9). Saves a lot of typing!