GNOME Mplayer

GNOME MPlayer is an open source application designed from the ground up to act as an easy-to-use and minimalistic GUI (Graphical User Interface) front-end for the well known MPlayer command-line software.

Features at a glance

The application supports Stereo, Surround and 5.1/7.1 Surround audio output, OSD, post-processing, AC3/DTS pass-through to S/PDIF, AAS (Advanced Substation Alpha) subtitles, embedded fonts, subtitle font scaling and encoding, keyboard shortcuts, MPlayer settings, plugin emulation, and language settings for audio and subtitle streams.

It can be used to play any audio or video file that MPlayer supports, including Audio-CDs, DVD-Video discs, VCDs, and Internet streams. In addition, it supports MKV and DVD chapters, video subtitles, album art retrieval from Amazon.com, and much more.

Getting started with GNOME MPlayer

At a first glance, the application looks like a very basic program that can only play files and nothing more. But don’t be fooled by its minimal interface, as it provides users with a great set of options, accessible from the Edit menu.

While the video output can be set to OpenGL, X11, XV, XVMC, VAAPI or VDPAU drivers, the audio output supports ALSA, PulseAudio, ARTS, ESD, JACK and OSS sound servers. Furthermore, users will be able to set hardware acceleration or CrystalHD hardware support.

Under the hood and conclusions

Under the hood, we can report that the application is written in the C programming language and the GTK+ toolkit, making it compatible with the GNOME desktop environment. However, it does not depend on the GNOME runtime libraries, but only on GTK+, GLib and D-Bus.

Overall, GNOME MPlayer is a great interface for the powerful MPlayer multimedia playback program. In the front it offers a very minimal GUI, but in the back it provides users with a wide range of features. We really wish that future versions of the application will have audio and video equalizers!

What is new in this release:

• Translation updates, general bug fixes. So hot key changes for example playlist is now F9, to be more compatible with other Gnome Apps
• New features: gnome-mplayer now includes a property page in Nautilus that displays media info. To use restart nautilus after installing and then select a media file and choose properties, you should see an Audio/Video tab and you can view the properties that mplayer knows there. If you have totem installed you might see two pages.

What is new in version 0.9.4:

• Compatibility with Free/Open/NetBSD
• Updated translations
• New commandline option "--showsubtitles" defaults to 1, set to 0 to
• prevent subtitles from showing by default.
• Cleanup glib/gtk assertions
• Fix window resize issues
• Better handling of initial video playback window, should cause fewer resizes
• Fix crashes when HOME is not set
• Fix some realplayer emulation issues, may not be entirely fixed as
• problem site is not accessible at my location
• Stability improvements
• Compatibility with libgpod 0.7 (API change between 0.6 and 0.7)
• Mixer option is only used when the ALSA ao is selected

What is new in version 0.9.3:

• Several internal changes that improve the way the application works.
• Updated translations.
• Improved subtitle and audio track selections.

What is new in version 0.9.2:

• Fix problematic playlist loading
• libgpod support, will load tracks off of ipods using ipod database
• Rework the track loading method, store more metadata internally so we
• don't have to refetch it
• If you have libmusicbrainz3 and libcurl installed album cover art will
• be loaded from the net. Use --disable_cover_art_fetch to work offline
• (also a preference setting)
• Rework the alsa stuff, add --mixer command line option and preference to
• choose the mixer you want to use. If no mixer specified it defaults to
• Master
• Use XDG .config and .cache directories (gnome-mplayer.conf in non-gconf2
• setup has moved from $HOME/.mplayer to $XDG_CONFIG_DIR/gnome-mplayer.
• Usually in $HOME/.config/gnome-mplayer.
• Packagers please note that you make want to check your libraries.

What is new in version 0.9.1:

• Fixes compile issues and a minor bug over 0.9.0

What is new in version 0.9.0:

• gnome-mplayer features full GIO support (works best when gvfs-fuse is installed) when compiled with a glib that includes gio.
• The optional usage of gconf, will fall back to glib keyfiles.
• Inclusion of a status icon on the tray
• Inclusion of libnotify support
• Several GUI improvements
• And several bug fixes
• If using a current SVN of mplayer (after Oct 1,08), gnome-mplayer will take advantage of some of those newer features if they are detected.
• Features include proper chapter support in MKV files and better pause support.

What is new in version 0.8.0:

• This release adds a "recently used file" menu, updated translations, and GUI enhancements.

Requirements:

• GTK+
• MPlayer