MPlayer

MPlayer packages for Ubuntu.

Introduction: one of the problems that a Ubuntu user may find when using SMPlayer is that not all options in the application work. This is because the version of MPlayer in Ubuntu is quite old (1.0rc2 is more than a year old). For that reason I built updated packages for MPlayer. I have also added some patches to MPlayer so it could work better with SMPlayer.

While these packages are intented to be used with SMPlayer, of course they can also be used alone. No need to install or use SMPlayer. Indeed I had care MPlayer would work "out of the box".

The mplayer package includes a configuration file (/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf) which will make mplayer to try to use xv and alsa as default.

These are the main differences you'll find when used along with SMPlayer (compared to mplayer 1.0rc2):

* the option to change the playback speed without altering the pitch will work (thanks to the new scaletempo filter)
* the option to change the volume just before start to play will work too.
* the audio equalizer will work as everybody would expect, when you move the controls you'll notice the change in the audio immediately, no need to click on the "Apply" button. (Thanks to the patcheq patch).
* the options to change the size of the subtitles (in the Subtitles menu) will work better.
* selection of subtitles works better now. Previously under some circumstances, it was possible that the selected subtitle in the SMPlayer menu and the subtitle actually selected by MPlayer may not match.
* you can use "gl:yuv=2:force-pbo:ati-hack" as video output, which is as fast as xv.

mencoder has also been patched to support the -ass option, so for instance you can use it to convert a mkv video to avi with embedded subtitles on the image which will look like exactly the same as when played with mplayer.

To install the OpenPGP key for this PPA, run this command in a terminal:
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 03E02400

UPDATE: Ubuntu Karmic finally provides a recent version of mplayer. Anyway there are some bugs in it and I still recommend to use the mplayer packages from this PPA, specially if you are going to use smplayer.