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MPlayer is an open source, free software media player that can currently play back more video and audio formats than any other media player. Among them are CDs, DVDs and Video CDs, multimedia container formats like AVI, ASF, MOV, RealMedia, Ogg and Matroska, video codecs like DivX, MPEG-1, MPEG-2MPEG-2 (1994) is the designation for a group of audio and video coding standards agreed upon by MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group), and published as ISO standard 13818. MPEG-2 is typically used to encode audio and video for broadcast signals, including, MPEG-4MPEG-4 introduced in 1998, is the designation for a group of audio and video coding standards agreed upon by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group). MPEG-4 is primarily designed to handle low bit rate content, from 4800 bit/s to approximately 4 Mbit/s. The p, SorensonThe Sorenson codec (also known as Sorenson Video Codec 3 or SVQ3 is a digital video codec devised by the company Sorenson Media and used by Apple's QuickTime and the newest version of Macromedia Flash, a special version called Sorenson Spark''. The Sorens, WMV, RealVideoRealVideo is a proprietary video codec developed by RealNetworks. It was first released in 1997 and as of 2004 is at version 10. RealVideo has historically been used to deliver streaming video across IP networks at low bit rates to desktop personal comput and audio codecs like MP3MP3 (or, more precisely, MPEG-1/2 Audio Layer 3 is an audio compression algorithm capable of greatly reducing the amount of data required to reproduce audio, while sounding like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to the listener., VorbisVorbis is a completely open and free audio compression ( codec) project from the Xiph. org Foundation. It is frequently used in conjunction with the Ogg container and is then called Ogg Vorbis . Vorbis was started following a September 1998 letter from Fr, RealAudioRealAudio is a proprietary audio codec developed by RealNetworks. It is especially designed to conform to low bandwidths, and it can be used as a streaming audio format, i. played at the same time as it's downloaded. Many radio stations use RealAudio to s and WMA. The program runs on most current operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Windows and Mac OS X.MPlayer supports a variety of different output devices to display video, including X11, Quartz Compositor, DirectX, VESA, SDL and fancy ones like ASCII art and Blinkenlights. MPlayer can also save internet audio or video streams to a file, to be processed at a later time.
Most video and audio codecs are supported natively through the libavcodec library of the FFmpeg project. Some proprietary codecs need binary DLL files, using a DLL loader forked from the WINE project.
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".
Development of MPlayer began in 2000. The original author Arpad 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.
There are a number of free programs which add a slightly more comfortable graphical user interface to MPlayer.
A companion program, the Movie Encoder MEncoder, takes 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.
