Thursday, June 12, 2008

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!

2 comments:

m-m said...

What really worked for me, was -sws 0. This uses the most stupidest software scaler. This meant the difference between not being to play my .mkv 1080p HDTV BluRay movie at all (about 4 frames per second is not enough to watch) to using a mere 70% of a core. Setting the software scaler to that value is supposed to be ugly, but it looked great. (Or: I couldnt detect the difference). Maybe it was a MacOS specific thing, but it's worth trying if you also run into speed issues.

Anonymous said...

#!/bin/bash

read -p "Which station?
GrooveSalad
Lush
Suburbsofgoa
DroneZone
indiepop
digitalis
poptron
covers
secretagent
bootliquor
illstreet
cliqhop
sonicuniverse
beatblender
Tags
spacestation
missioncontrol
doomed
"; mplayer -vo none -ao sdl http://somafm.com/startstream=${REPLY}.pls