There are two ways to get TrueType fonts to work. The first is to pass the -font option to specify a TrueType font file on the command line. This option will be a good candidate to put in your configuration file (see the manual page for details). The second is to create a symlink called subfont.ttf to the font file of your choice. Either

ln -s /path/to/sample_font.ttf ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf

for each user individually or a system-wide one:

ln -s /path/to/sample_font.ttf $PREFIX/share/mplayer/subfont.ttf

If MPlayer was compiled with fontconfig support, the above methods won't work, instead -font expects a fontconfig font name and defaults to the sans-serif font. Example:

mplayer -font 'Bitstream Vera Sans' anime.mkv

To get a list of fonts known to fontconfig, use fc-list.

If for some reason you wish or need to employ bitmap fonts, download a set from our homepage. You can choose between various ISO fonts and some sets of fonts contributed by users in various encodings.

Uncompress the file you downloaded to ~/.mplayer or $PREFIX/share/mplayer. Then rename or symlink one of the extracted directories to font, for example:

ln -s ~/.mplayer/arial-24 ~/.mplayer/font

ln -s $PREFIX/share/mplayer/arial-24 $PREFIX/share/mplayer/font

Fonts should have an appropriate font.desc file which maps Unicode font positions to the actual code page of the subtitle text. Another solution is to have UTF-8-encoded subtitles and use the -utf8 option or give the subtitles file the same name as your video file with a .utf extension and have it in the same directory as the video file.

MPlayer has a completely user-definable OSD Menu interface.

Xvid is a free software MPEG-4 ASP compliant video codec. Note that Xvid is not necessary to decode Xvid-encoded video. libavcodec is used by default as it offers better speed.

x264 is a library for creating H.264 video. MPlayer sources are updated whenever an x264 API change occurs, so it is always suggested to use MPlayer from Subversion.

If you have a GIT client installed, the latest x264 sources can be gotten with this command:

git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git

Then build and install in the standard way:

./configure && make && make install

Now rerun ./configure for MPlayer to pick up x264 support.

MPlayer can use the OpenCORE AMR libraries through FFmpeg. Download the libraries for AMR-NB and AMR-WB from the opencore-amr project and install them according to the instructions on that page.

MPlayer can use XMMS input plugins to play many file formats. There are plugins for SNES game tunes, SID tunes (from Commodore 64), many Amiga formats, .xm, .it, VQF, Musepack, Bonk, shorten and many others. You can find them at the XMMS input plugin page.

For this feature you need to have XMMS and compile MPlayer with ./configure --enable-xmms.

MPlayer allows you bind any key/button to any MPlayer command using a simple config file. The syntax consist of a key name followed by a command. The default config file location is $HOME/.mplayer/input.conf but it can be overridden using the -input conf option (relative path are relative to $HOME/.mplayer).

You can get a full list of supported key names by running mplayer -input keylist and a full list of available commands by running mplayer -input cmdlist.

##
## MPlayer input control file
##

RIGHT seek +10
LEFT seek -10
- audio_delay 0.100
+ audio_delay -0.100
q quit
> pt_step 1
< pt_step -1
ENTER pt_step 1 1

Linux Infrared Remote Control - use an easy to build home-brewed IR-receiver, an (almost) arbitrary remote control and control your Linux box with it! More about it on the LIRC homepage.

If you have the LIRC package installed, configure will autodetect it. If everything went fine, MPlayer will print "Setting up LIRC support..." on startup. If an error occurs it will tell you. If there is no message about LIRC there is no support compiled in. That's it :-)

The application name for MPlayer is - surprise - mplayer. You can use any MPlayer commands and even pass more than one command by separating them with \n. Do not forget to enable the repeat flag in .lircrc when it makes sense (seek, volume, etc). Here is an excerpt from a sample .lircrc:

begin
     button = VOLUME_PLUS
     prog = mplayer
     config = volume 1
     repeat = 1
end

begin
    button = VOLUME_MINUS
    prog = mplayer
    config = volume -1
    repeat = 1
end

begin
    button = CD_PLAY
    prog = mplayer
    config = pause
end

begin
    button = CD_STOP
    prog = mplayer
    config = seek 0 1\npause
end

If you do not like the standard location for the lirc-config file (~/.lircrc) use the -lircconf filename switch to specify another file.

The slave mode allows you to build simple frontends to MPlayer. When run with the -slave option MPlayer will read commands separated by a newline (\n) from stdin. The commands are documented in the slave.txt file.

Once you succeed in making MPlayer play your favorite internet stream, you can use the option -dumpstream to save the stream into a file. For example:

mplayer http://217.71.208.37:8006 -dumpstream -dumpfile stream.asf

will save the content streamed from http://217.71.208.37:8006 into stream.asf. This works with all protocols supported by MPlayer, like MMS, RTSP, and so forth.

DVD drives nowadays come with a nonsensical restriction labeled region code. This is a scheme to force DVD drives to only accept DVDs produced for one of the six different regions into which the world was partitioned. How a group of people can sit around a table, come up with such an idea and expect the world of the 21st century to bow to their will is beyond anyone's guess.

Drives that enforce region settings through software only are also known as RPC-1 drives, those that do it in hardware as RPC-2. RPC-2 drives allow changing the region code five times before it remains fixed. Under Linux you can use the regionset tool to set the region code of your DVD drive.

Thankfully, it is possible to convert RPC-2 drives into RPC-1 drives through a firmware upgrade. Feed the model number of your DVD drive into your favorite search engine or have a look at the forum and download sections of "The firmware page". While the usual caveats for firmware upgrades apply, experience with getting rid of region code enforcement is generally positive.

Include the -edl <filename> flag when you run MPlayer, with the name of the EDL file you want applied to the video.

The current EDL file format is:

[begin second] [end second] [action]

Where the seconds are floating-point numbers and the action is either 0 for skip or 1 for mute. Example:

5.3   7.1    0
15    16.7   1
420   422    0

This will skip from second 5.3 to second 7.1 of the video, then mute at 15 seconds, unmute at 16.7 seconds and skip from second 420 to second 422 of the video. These actions will be performed when the playback timer reaches the times given in the file.

To create an EDL file to work from, use the -edlout <filename> flag. During playback, just hit i to mark the beginning and end of a skip block. A corresponding entry will be written to the file for that time. You can then go back and fine-tune the generated EDL file as well as change the default operation which is to skip the block described by each line.

Most DVDs and many other files include surround sound. MPlayer supports surround playback but does not enable it by default because stereo equipment is by far more common. To play a file that has more than two channels of audio use -channels. For example, to play a DVD with 5.1 audio:

mplayer dvd://1 -channels 6

Note that despite the name "5.1" there are actually six discrete channels. If you have surround sound equipment it is safe to put the channels option in your MPlayer configuration file ~/.mplayer/config. For example, to make quadraphonic playback the default, add this line:

channels=4

MPlayer will then output audio in four channels when all four channels are available.

MPlayer does not duplicate any channels by default, and neither do most audio drivers. If you want to do that manually:

mplayer filename -af channels=2:2:0:1:0:0

See the section on channel copying for an explanation.

DVDs usually have surround audio encoded in AC-3 (Dolby Digital) or DTS (Digital Theater System) format. Some modern audio equipment is capable of decoding these formats internally. MPlayer can be configured to relay the audio data without decoding it. This will only work if you have a S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface) jack in your sound card, or if you are passing audio over HDMI.

If your audio equipment can decode both AC-3 and DTS, you can safely enable passthrough for both formats. Otherwise, enable passthrough for only the format your equipment supports.

Note that there is a comma (",") at the end of ac=hwac3, and ac=hwdts,. This will make MPlayer fall back on the codecs it normally uses when playing a file that does not have AC-3 or DTS audio. afm=hwac3 does not need a comma; MPlayer will fall back anyway when an audio family is specified.

Digital TV transmissions (such as DVB and ATSC) and some DVDs usually have MPEG audio streams (in particular MP2). Some MPEG hardware decoders such as full-featured DVB cards and DXR2 adapters can natively decode this format. MPlayer can be configured to relay the audio data without decoding it.

To use this codec:

 mplayer -ac hwmpa 

***TODO***

This section has yet to be written and cannot be completed until somebody provides sample files for us to test. If you have any matrix-encoded audio files, know where to find some, or have any information that could be helpful, please send a message to the MPlayer-DOCS mailing list. Put "[matrix-encoded audio]" in the subject line.

If no files or further information are forthcoming this section will be dropped.

Good links:

MPlayer includes an HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) filter based on an MIT project wherein measurements were taken from microphones mounted on a dummy human head.

Although it is not possible to exactly imitate a surround system, MPlayer's HRTF filter does provide more spatially immersive audio in 2-channel headphones. Regular downmixing simply combines all the channels into two; besides combining the channels, hrtf generates subtle echoes, increases the stereo separation slightly, and alters the volume of some frequencies. Whether HRTF sounds better may be dependent on the source audio and a matter of personal taste, but it is definitely worth trying out.

To play a DVD with HRTF:

mplayer dvd://1 -channels 6 -af hrtf

hrtf only works well with 5 or 6 channels. Also, hrtf requires 48 kHz audio. DVD audio is already 48 kHz, but if you have a file with a different sampling rate that you want to play using hrtf you must resample it:

mplayer filename -channels 6 -af resample=48000,hrtf

If you do not hear any sound out of your surround channels, check your mixer settings with a mixer program such as alsamixer; audio outputs are often muted and set to zero volume by default.

Unfortunately, there is no standard for how channels are ordered. The orders listed below are those of AC-3 and are fairly typical; try them and see if your source matches. Channels are numbered starting with 0.

The -channels option is used to request the number of channels from the audio decoder. Some audio codecs use the number of specified channels to decide if downmixing the source is necessary. Note that this does not always affect the number of output channels. For example, using -channels 4 to play a stereo MP3 file will still result in 2-channel output since the MP3 codec will not produce the extra channels.

The channels audio filter can be used to create or remove channels and is useful for controlling the number of channels sent to the sound card. See the following sections for more information on channel manipulation.

Mono sounds a lot better when played through two speakers - especially when using headphones. Audio files that truly have one channel are automatically played through two speakers; unfortunately, most files with mono sound are actually encoded as stereo with one channel silent. The easiest and most foolproof way to make both speakers output the same audio is the extrastereo filter:

mplayer filename -af extrastereo=0

This averages both channels, resulting in both channels being half as loud as the original. The next sections have examples of other ways to do this without a volume decrease, but they are more complex and require different options depending on which channel to keep. If you really need to maintain the volume, it may be easier to experiment with the volume filter and find the right value. For example:

mplayer filename -af extrastereo=0,volume=5

The channels filter can move any or all channels. Setting up all the suboptions for the channels filter can be complicated and takes a little care.

Example: one channel in two speakers

Here is an example of another way to play one channel in both speakers. Suppose for this example that the left channel should be played and the right channel discarded. Following the steps above:

Putting that all together gives:

mplayer filename -af channels=2:2:0:1:0:0

The advantage this example has over extrastereo is that the volume of each output channel is the same as the input channel. The disadvantage is that the suboptions must be changed to "2:2:1:0:1:1" when the desired audio is in the right channel. Also, it is more difficult to remember and type.

Example: left channel in two speakers shortcut

There is actually a much easier way to use the channels filter for playing the left channel in both speakers:

mplayer filename -af channels=1

The second channel is discarded and, with no further suboptions, the single remaining channel is left alone. Sound card drivers automatically play single-channel audio in both speakers. This only works when the desired channel is on the left.

Example: duplicate front channels to the rear

Another common operation is to duplicate the front channels and play them back on the rear speakers of a quadraphonic setup.

Combine all the suboptions to get:

mplayer filename -af channels=4:4:0:2:0:0:1:3:1:1

The pan filter can mix channels in user-specified proportions. This allows for everything the channels filter can do and more. Unfortunately, the suboptions are much more complicated.

Example: one channel in two speakers

Here is yet another example for playing the left channel in two speakers. Follow the steps above:

Putting those options together gives:

mplayer filename -af pan=2:1:1:0:0

If the right channel is desired instead of the left, the suboptions to pan will be "2:0:0:1:1".

Example: left channel in two speakers shortcut

As with channels, there is a shortcut that only works with the left channel:

mplayer filename -af pan=1:1

Since pan has only one channel of input (the other channel is discarded), there is only one set with one suboption, which specifies that the only channel gets 100% of itself.

Example: downmixing 6-channel PCM

MPlayer's decoder for 6-channel PCM is not capable of downmixing. Here is a way to downmix PCM using pan:

Put all that together, for:

mplayer 6-channel.wav -af pan=2:1:0:0:1:1:0:0:1:0.5:0.5:1:1

The percentages listed above are only a rough example. Feel free to tweak them.

Example: Playing 5.1 audio on big speakers without a subwoofer

If you have a huge pair of front speakers you may not want to waste any money on buying a subwoofer for a complete 5.1 sound system. If you use -channels 5 to request that liba52 decode 5.1 audio in 5.0, the subwoofer channel is simply discarded. If you want to distribute the subwoofer channel yourself you need to downmix manually with pan:

Combine all those options to get:

mplayer dvd://1 -channels 6 -af pan=5:1:0:0:0:0:0:1:0:0:0:0:0:1:0:0:0:0:0:1:0:0:0:0:0:1:0.5:0.5:0:0:0

The full listing of the options is available on the manual page. Here are just a few tips:

MPlayer supports regular text, graphics and navigation links. Unfortunately, colored pages are not fully supported yet - all pages are shown as grayscaled. Subtitle pages (also known as Closed Captions) are supported, too.

MPlayer starts caching all teletext pages upon starting to receive TV input, so you do not need to wait until the requested page is loaded.

Note: Using teletext with -vo xv causes strange colors.

To enable teletext decoding you must specify the VBI device to get teletext data from (usually /dev/vbi0 for Linux). This can be done by specifying tdevice in your configuration file, like shown below:

tv=tdevice=/dev/vbi0

You might need to specify the teletext language code for your country. To list all available country codes use

tv=tdevice=/dev/vbi0:tlang=-1

Here is an example for Russian:

tv=tdevice=/dev/vbi0:tlang=33

The full listing of the options is available in the manual page. Here are just a few tips:

Since VIDIX requires direct hardware access you can either run it as root or set the SUID bit on the MPlayer binary (Warning: This is a security risk!). Alternatively, you can use a special kernel module, like this:

Currently most ATI cards are supported natively, from Mach64 to the newest Radeons.

There are two compiled binaries: radeon_vid for Radeon and rage128_vid for Rage 128 cards. You may force one or let the VIDIX system autoprobe all available drivers.

Matrox G200, G400, G450 and G550 have been reported to work.

The driver supports video equalizers and should be nearly as fast as the Matrox framebuffer

There is a driver available for the Trident Cyberblade/i1 chipset, which can be found on VIA Epia motherboards.

The driver was written and is maintained by Alastair M. Robinson.

Although there is a driver for the 3DLabs GLINT R3 and Permedia3 chips, no one has tested it, so reports are welcome.

An unique feature of the nvidia_vid driver is its ability to display video on plain, pure, text-only console - with no framebuffer or X magic whatsoever. For this purpose, we'll have to use the cvidix video output, as the following example shows:

mplayer -vo cvidix example.avi

This is very experimental code, just like nvidia_vid.

It's been tested on SiS 650/651/740 (the most common chipsets used in the SiS versions of the "Shuttle XPC" barebones boxes out there)

Reports awaited!

MPlayer supports cards with the Siemens DVB chipset from vendors like Siemens, Technotrend, Galaxis or Hauppauge. The latest DVB drivers are available from the Linux TV site. If you want to do software transcoding you should have at least a 1GHz CPU.

Configure should detect your DVB card. If it did not, force detection with

./configure --enable-dvb

Then compile and install as usual.

USAGE.  Hardware decoding of streams containing MPEG-1/2 video and/or MPEG audio can be done with this command:

mplayer -ao mpegpes -vo mpegpes file.mpg|vob

Decoding of any other type of video stream requires transcoding to MPEG-1, thus it's slow and may not be worth the trouble, especially if your computer is slow. It can be achieved using a command like this:

mplayer -ao mpegpes -vo mpegpes yourfile.ext
mplayer -ao mpegpes -vo mpegpes -vf expand yourfile.ext

Note that DVB cards only support heights 288 and 576 for PAL or 240 and 480 for NTSC. You must rescale for other heights by adding scale=width:height with the width and height you want to the -vf option. DVB cards accept various widths, like 720, 704, 640, 512, 480, 352 etc. and do hardware scaling in horizontal direction, so you do not need to scale horizontally in most cases. For a 512x384 (aspect 4:3) MPEG-4 (DivX) try:

mplayer -ao mpegpes -vo mpegpes -vf scale=512:576

If you have a widescreen movie and you do not want to scale it to full height, you can use the expand=w:h filter to add black bands. To view a 640x384 MPEG-4 (DivX), try:

mplayer -ao mpegpes -vo mpegpes -vf expand=640:576 file.avi

If your CPU is too slow for a full size 720x576 MPEG-4 (DivX), try downscaling:

mplayer -ao mpegpes -vo mpegpes -vf scale=352:576 file.avi

If speed does not improve, try vertical downscaling, too:

mplayer -ao mpegpes -vo mpegpes -vf scale=352:288 file.avi

For OSD and subtitles use the OSD feature of the expand filter. So, instead of expand=w:h or expand=w:h:x:y, use expand=w:h:x:y:1 (the 5th parameter :1 at the end will enable OSD rendering). You may want to move the image up a bit to get a bigger black zone for subtitles. You may also want to move subtitles up, if they are outside your TV screen, use the -subpos <0-100> option to adjust this (-subpos 80 is a good choice).

In order to play non-25fps movies on a PAL TV or with a slow CPU, add the -framedrop option.

To keep the aspect ratio of MPEG-4 (DivX) files and get the optimal scaling parameters (hardware horizontal scaling and software vertical scaling while keeping the right aspect ratio), use the new dvbscale filter:

for a  4:3 TV: -vf dvbscale,scale=-1:0,expand=-1:576:-1:-1:1
for a 16:9 TV: -vf dvbscale=1024,scale=-1:0,expand=-1:576:-1:-1:1

Digital TV (DVB input module). You can use your DVB card for watching Digital TV.

You should have the programs scan and szap/tzap/czap/azap installed; they are all included in the drivers package.

Verify that your drivers are working properly with a program such as dvbstream (that is the base of the DVB input module).

Now you should compile a ~/.mplayer/channels.conf file, with the syntax accepted by szap/tzap/czap/azap, or have scan compile it for you.

If you have more than one card type (e.g. Satellite, Terrestrial, Cable and ATSC) you can save your channels files as ~/.mplayer/channels.conf.sat, ~/.mplayer/channels.conf.ter, ~/.mplayer/channels.conf.cbl, and ~/.mplayer/channels.conf.atsc, respectively, so as to implicitly hint MPlayer to use these files rather than ~/.mplayer/channels.conf, and you only need to specify which card to use.

Make sure that you have only Free to Air channels in your channels.conf file, or MPlayer will wait for an unencrypted transmission.

In your audio and video fields you can use an extended syntax: ...:pid[+pid]:... (for a maximum of 6 pids each); in this case MPlayer will include in the stream all the indicated pids, plus pid 0 (that contains the PAT). You should always include in each row the PMT and PCR pids for the corresponding channel (if you know them). You can also specify 8192, this will select all pids on this frequency and you can then switch between the programs with TAB. This might need more bandwidth, though cheap cards always transfer all channels at least to the kernel so it does not make much of a difference for these. Other possible uses are: televideo pid, second audio track, etc.

If MPlayer complains frequently about

Too many video/audio packets in the buffer

or if you notice a growing desynchronization between audio and video verify the presence of the PCR pid in your stream (needed to comply with the buffering model of the transmitter) and/or try to use the libavformat MPEG-TS demuxer by adding -demuxer lavf -lavfdopts probesize=128 to your command line.

To show the first of the channels present in your list, run

mplayer dvb://

If you want to watch a specific channel, such as R1, run

mplayer dvb://R1

If you have more than one card you also need to specify the number of the card where the channel is visible (e.g. 2) with the syntax:

mplayer dvb://2@R1

To change channels press the h (next) and k (previous) keys, or use the OSD menu.

To temporarily disable the audio or the video stream copy the following to ~/.mplayer/input.conf:

% set_property  switch_video -2
& step_property switch_video
? set_property  switch_audio -2
^ step_property switch_audio

(Overriding the action keys as preferred.) When pressing the key corresponding to switch_x -2 the associated stream will be closed; when pressing the key corresponding to step_x the stream will be reopened. Notice that this switching mechanism will not work as expected when there are multiple audio and video streams in the multiplex.

During playback (not during recording), in order to prevent stuttering and error messages such as 'Your system is too slow' it is advisable to add

-mc 10 -speed 0.97 -af scaletempo

to your command line, adjusting the scaletempo parameters as preferred.

If your ~/.mplayer/menu.conf contains a <dvbsel> entry, such as the one in the example file etc/dvb-menu.conf (that you can use to overwrite ~/.mplayer/menu.conf), the main menu will show a sub-menu entry that will permit you to choose one of the channels present in your channels.conf, possibly preceded by a menu with the list of cards available if more than one is usable by MPlayer.

If you want to save a program to disk you can use

mplayer -dumpfile r1.ts -dumpstream dvb://R1

If you want to record it in a different format (re-encoding it) instead you can run a command such as

mencoder -o r1.avi -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=800 \
    -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=128 -pp=ci dvb://R1

Read the man page for a list of options that you can pass to the DVB input module.

FUTURE.  If you have questions or want to hear feature announcements and take part in discussions on this subject, join our MPlayer-DVB mailing list. Please remember that the list language is English.

In the future you may expect the ability to display OSD and subtitles using the native OSD feature of DVB cards.

MPlayer supports hardware accelerated playback with the Creative DXR2 card.

First of all you will need properly installed DXR2 drivers. You can find the drivers and installation instructions at the DXR2 Resource Center site.

The overlay chipset used on the DXR2 is of pretty bad quality but the default settings should work for everybody. The OSD may be usable with the overlay (not on TV) by drawing it in the colorkey. With the default colorkey settings you may get variable results, usually you will see the colorkey around the characters or some other funny effect. But if you properly adjust the colorkey settings you should be able to get acceptable results.

Please see the man page for available options.

MPlayer supports hardware accelerated playback with the Creative DXR3 and Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus cards. These cards both use the em8300 MPEG decoder chip from Sigma Designs.

First of all you will need properly installed DXR3/H+ drivers, version 0.12.0 or later. You can find the drivers and installation instructions at the DXR3 & Hollywood Plus for Linux site. configure should detect your card automatically, compilation should go without problems.

Under Linux you have two methods to get G400 TV out working:

TV output support for these cards has only been recently introduced, and is not yet in the mainstream kernel. Currently the mga_vid module can't be used AFAIK, because the G450/G550 driver works only in one configuration: the first CRTC chip (with much more features) on the first display (on monitor), and the second CRTC (no BES - for explanation on BES, please see the G400 section above) on TV. So you can only use MPlayer's fbdev output driver at the present.

The first CRTC can't be routed to the second head currently. The author of the kernel matroxfb driver - Petr Vandrovec - will maybe make support for this, by displaying the first CRTC's output onto both of the heads at once, as currently recommended for G400, see the section above.

The necessary kernel patch and the detailed HOWTO is downloadable from http://www.bglug.ca/matrox_tvout/

No one takes any responsibility, nor guarantee for any damage caused by this documentation.

Cable for G400.  The CRTC2 connector's fourth pin is the composite video signal. The ground are the sixth, seventh and eighth pins. (info contributed from Balázs Rácz)

Cable for G450.  The CRTC2 connector's first pin is the composite video signal. The ground are the fifth, sixth, seventh, and fifteenth (5, 6, 7, 15) pins. (info contributed from Balázs Kerekes)

PREAMBLE.  Currently ATI doesn't want to support any of its TV-out chips under Linux, because of their licensed Macrovision technology.

On other cards, just use the VESA driver, without VIDIX. Powerful CPU is needed, though.

Only thing you need to do - Have the TV connector plugged in before booting your PC since video BIOS initializes itself only once during POST procedure.

First, you MUST download the closed-source drivers from http://nvidia.com. I will not describe the installation and configuration process because it does not cover the scope of this documentation.

After XFree86, XVideo, and 3D acceleration is properly working, edit your card's Device section in the XF86Config file, according to the following example (adapt for your card/TV):

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "GeForce"
        VendorName      "ASUS"
        BoardName       "nVidia GeForce2/MX 400"
        Driver          "nvidia"
        #Option         "NvAGP" "1"
        Option          "NoLogo"
        Option          "CursorShadow"  "on"

        Option          "TwinView"
        Option          "TwinViewOrientation" "Clone"
        Option          "MetaModes" "1024x768,640x480"
        Option          "ConnectedMonitor" "CRT, TV"
        Option          "TVStandard" "PAL-B"
        Option          "TVOutFormat" "Composite"
EndSection

Of course the important thing is the TwinView part.

The NeoMagic chip is found in a variety of laptops, some of them are equipped with a simple analog TV encoder, some have a more advanced one.

To build a Debian package, run the following command in the MPlayer source directory:

fakeroot debian/rules binary

If you want to pass custom options to configure, you can set up the DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS environment variable. For instance, if you want GUI and OSD menu support you would use:

DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="--enable-gui --enable-menu" fakeroot debian/rules binary

You can also pass some variables to the Makefile. For example, if you want to compile with gcc 3.4 even if it's not the default compiler:

CC=gcc-3.4 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="--enable-gui" fakeroot debian/rules binary

To clean up the source tree run the following command:

fakeroot debian/rules clean

As root you can then install the .deb package as usual:

dpkg -i ../mplayer_version.deb

To build an RPM package, run the following command in the MPlayer source directory:

FIXME: insert proper commands here

MPlayer works on Linux PDAs with ARM CPU e.g. Sharp Zaurus, Compaq Ipaq. The easiest way to obtain MPlayer is to get it from one of the OpenZaurus package feeds. If you want to compile it yourself, you should look at the mplayer and the libavcodec directory in the OpenZaurus distribution buildroot. These always have the latest Makefile and patches used for building a SVN MPlayer. If you need a GUI frontend, you can use xmms-embedded.

If your CPU has SSE, recompile your kernel with "options CPU_ENABLE_SSE" (FreeBSD-STABLE or kernel patches required).

Due to limitations in different versions of gas (relocation vs MMX), you will need to compile in two steps: First make sure that the non-native as is first in your $PATH and do a gmake -k, then make sure that the native version is used and do gmake.

As of OpenBSD 3.4 the hack above is no longer needed.

See the Mac OS section.

Solaris still has broken, POSIX-incompatible system tools and shell in default locations. Until a bold step out of the computing stone age is made, you will have to add /usr/xpg4/bin to your PATH.

MPlayer should work on Solaris 2.6 or newer. Use the SUN audio driver with the -ao sun option for sound.

On UltraSPARCs, MPlayer takes advantage of their VIS extensions (equivalent to MMX), currently only in libmpeg2, libvo and libavcodec. You can watch a VOB file on a 400MHz CPU. You'll need mLib installed.

Caveat:

On Solaris SPARC, you need the GNU C/C++ Compiler; it does not matter if GNU C/C++ compiler is configured with or without the GNU assembler.

On Solaris x86, you need the GNU assembler and the GNU C/C++ compiler, configured to use the GNU assembler! The MPlayer code on the x86 platform makes heavy use of MMX, SSE and 3DNOW! instructions that cannot be compiled using Sun's assembler /usr/ccs/bin/as.

The configure script tries to find out, which assembler program is used by your "gcc" command (in case the autodetection fails, use the --as=/wherever/you/have/installed/gnu-as option to tell the configure script where it can find GNU "as" on your system).

Solutions to common problems:

Joe Page hosts a detailed HP-UX MPlayer HOWTO by Martin Gansser on his homepage. With these instructions the build should work out of the box. The following information is taken from this HOWTO.

You need GCC 3.4.0 or later and SDL 1.2.7 or later. HP cc will not produce a working program, prior GCC versions are buggy. For OpenGL functionality you need to install Mesa and the gl and gl2 video output drivers should work, speed may be very bad, depending on the CPU speed, though. A good replacement for the rather poor native HP-UX sound system is GNU esound.

Create the DVD device scan the SCSI bus with:

# ioscan -fn

Class          I            H/W   Path          Driver    S/W State    H/W Type        Description
...
ext_bus 1    8/16/5      c720  CLAIMED INTERFACE  Built-in SCSI
target  3    8/16/5.2    tgt   CLAIMED DEVICE
disk    4    8/16/5.2.0  sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE     PIONEER DVD-ROM DVD-305
                         /dev/dsk/c1t2d0 /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0
target  4    8/16/5.7    tgt   CLAIMED DEVICE
ctl     1    8/16/5.7.0  sctl  CLAIMED DEVICE     Initiator
                         /dev/rscsi/c1t7d0 /dev/rscsi/c1t7l0 /dev/scsi/c1t7l0
...

The screen output shows a Pioneer DVD-ROM at SCSI address 2. The card instance for hardware path 8/16 is 1.

Create a link from the raw device to the DVD device.

ln -s /dev/rdsk/c<SCSI bus instance>t<SCSI target ID>d<LUN> /dev/<device>

Example:

ln -s /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0 /dev/dvd

Below are solutions for some common problems:

MPlayer builds successfully on AIX 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3, using GCC 3.3 or greater. Building MPlayer on AIX 4.3.3 and below is untested. It is highly recommended that you build MPlayer using GCC 3.4 or greater, or if you are building on POWER5, GCC 4.0 is required.

CPU detection is still a work in progress. The following architectures have been tested:

The following architectures are untested, but should still work:

Sound via the Ultimedia Services is not supported, as Ultimedia was dropped in AIX 5.1; therefore, the only option is to use the AIX Open Sound System (OSS) drivers from 4Front Technologies at http://www.opensound.com/aix.html. 4Front Technologies freely provides OSS drivers for AIX 5.1 for non-commercial use; however, there are currently no sound output drivers for AIX 5.2 or 5.3. This means AIX 5.2 and 5.3 are not capable of MPlayer audio output, presently.

Solutions to common problems:

You'll need to download and install SDL for QNX. Then run MPlayer with -vo sdl:driver=photon and -ao sdl:nto options, it should be fast.

The -vo x11 output will be even slower than on Linux, since QNX has only X emulation which is very slow.

You need to run Cygwin 1.5.0 or later in order to compile MPlayer.

DirectX header files need to be extracted to /usr/include/ or /usr/local/include/.

Instructions and files for making SDL run under Cygwin can be found on the libsdl site.

You need MinGW 3.1.0 or later and MSYS 1.0.9 or later. Tell the MSYS postinstall that MinGW is installed.

Extract DirectX header files to /mingw/include/.

MOV compressed header support requires zlib, which MinGW does not provide by default. Configure it with --prefix=/mingw and install it before compiling MPlayer.

Complete instructions for building MPlayer and necessary libraries can be found in the MPlayer MinGW HOWTO.

You can get a native GUI for MPlayer together with precompiled MPlayer binaries for Mac OS X from the MPlayerOSX project, but be warned: that project is not active anymore.

Fortunately, MPlayerOSX has been taken over by a member of the MPlayer team. Preview releases are available from our download page and an official release should arrive soon.

In order to build MPlayerOSX from source yourself, you need the mplayerosx, the main and a copy of the main SVN module named main_noaltivec. mplayerosx is the GUI frontend, main is MPlayer and main_noaltivec is MPlayer built without AltiVec support.

To check out SVN modules use:

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayerosx/trunk/ mplayerosx
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk/ main

In order to build MPlayerOSX you will need to set up something like this:

MPlayer_source_directory
   |
   |--->main           (MPlayer Subversion source)
   |
   |--->main_noaltivec (MPlayer Subversion source configured with --disable-altivec)
   |
   \--->mplayerosx     (MPlayer OS X Subversion source)

You first need to build main and main_noaltivec.

To begin with, in order to ensure maximum backwards compatibility, set an environment variable:

export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.3

Then, configure:

If you configure for a G4 or later CPU with AltiVec support, do as follows:

./configure --disable-gl --disable-x11

If you configure for a G3-powered machine without AltiVec, use:

./configure --disable-gl --disable-x11 --disable-altivec

You may need to edit config.mak and change -mcpu and -mtune from 74XX to G3.

Continue with

make

then go to the mplayerosx directory and type

make dist

This will create a compressed .dmg archive with the ready to use binary.

You can also use the Xcode 2.1 project; the old project for Xcode 1.x does not work anymore.

Before you even think about encoding a movie, you need to take several preliminary steps.

The first and most important step before you encode should be determining what type of content you are dealing with. If your source material comes from DVD or broadcast/cable/satellite TV, it will be stored in one of two formats: NTSC for North America and Japan, PAL for Europe, etc. It is important to realize, however, that this is just the formatting for presentation on a television, and often does not correspond to the original format of the movie. Experience shows that NTSC material is a lot more difficult to encode, because there more elements to identify in the source. In order to produce a suitable encode, you need to know the original format. Failure to take this into account will result in various flaws in your encode, including ugly combing (interlacing) artifacts and duplicated or even lost frames. Besides being ugly, the artifacts also harm coding efficiency: You will get worse quality per unit bitrate.

It is possible to encode your movie at a wide range of qualities. With modern video encoders and a bit of pre-codec compression (downscaling and denoising), it is possible to achieve very good quality at 700 MB, for a 90-110 minute widescreen movie. Furthermore, all but the longest movies can be encoded with near-perfect quality at 1400 MB.

There are three approaches to encoding the video: constant bitrate (CBR), constant quantizer, and multipass (ABR, or average bitrate).

The complexity of the frames of a movie, and thus the number of bits required to compress them, can vary greatly from one scene to another. Modern video encoders can adjust to these needs as they go and vary the bitrate. In simple modes such as CBR, however, the encoders do not know the bitrate needs of future scenes and so cannot exceed the requested average bitrate for long stretches of time. More advanced modes, such as multipass encode, can take into account the statistics from previous passes; this fixes the problem mentioned above.

In each of these modes, the video codec (such as libavcodec) breaks the video frame into 16x16 pixel macroblocks and then applies a quantizer to each macroblock. The lower the quantizer, the better the quality and higher the bitrate. The method the movie encoder uses to determine which quantizer to use for a given macroblock varies and is highly tunable. (This is an extreme over-simplification of the actual process, but the basic concept is useful to understand.)

When you specify a constant bitrate, the video codec will encode the video, discarding detail as much as necessary and as little as possible in order to remain lower than the given bitrate. If you truly do not care about file size, you could as well use CBR and specify a bitrate of infinity. (In practice, this means a value high enough so that it poses no limit, like 10000Kbit.) With no real restriction on bitrate, the result is that the codec will use the lowest possible quantizer for each macroblock (as specified by vqmin for libavcodec, which is 2 by default). As soon as you specify a low enough bitrate that the codec is forced to use a higher quantizer, then you are almost certainly ruining the quality of your video. In order to avoid that, you should probably downscale your video, according to the method described later on in this guide. In general, you should avoid CBR altogether if you care about quality.

With constant quantizer, the codec uses the same quantizer, as specified by the vqscale option (for libavcodec), on every macroblock. If you want the highest quality rip possible, again ignoring bitrate, you can use vqscale=2. This will yield the same bitrate and PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) as CBR with vbitrate=infinity and the default vqmin of 2.

The problem with constant quantizing is that it uses the given quantizer whether the macroblock needs it or not. That is, it might be possible to use a higher quantizer on a macroblock without sacrificing visual quality. Why waste the bits on an unnecessarily low quantizer? Your CPU has as many cycles as there is time, but there is only so many bits on your hard disk.

With a two pass encode, the first pass will rip the movie as though it were CBR, but it will keep a log of properties for each frame. This data is then used during the second pass in order to make intelligent decisions about which quantizers to use. During fast action or high detail scenes, higher quantizers will likely be used, and during slow moving or low detail scenes, lower quantizers will be used. Normally, the amount of motion is much more important than the amount of detail.

If you use vqscale=2, then you are wasting bits. If you use vqscale=3, then you are not getting the highest quality rip. Suppose you rip a DVD at vqscale=3, and the result is 1800Kbit. If you do a two pass encode with vbitrate=1800, the resulting video will have higher quality for the same bitrate.

Since you are now convinced that two pass is the way to go, the real question now is what bitrate to use? The answer is that there is no single answer. Ideally you want to choose a bitrate that yields the best balance between quality and file size. This is going to vary depending on the source video.

If size does not matter, a good starting point for a very high quality rip is about 2000Kbit plus or minus 200Kbit. For fast action or high detail source video, or if you just have a very critical eye, you might decide on 2400 or 2600. For some DVDs, you might not notice a difference at 1400Kbit. It is a good idea to experiment with scenes at different bitrates to get a feel.

If you aim at a certain size, you will have to somehow calculate the bitrate. But before that, you need to know how much space you should reserve for the audio track(s), so you should rip those first. You can compute the bitrate with the following equation: bitrate = (target_size_in_Mbytes - sound_size_in_Mbytes) * 1024 * 1024 / length_in_secs * 8 / 1000 For instance, to squeeze a two-hour movie onto a 702MB CD, with 60MB of audio track, the video bitrate will have to be: (702 - 60) * 1024 * 1024 / (120*60) * 8 / 1000 = 740kbps

Due to the nature of MPEG-type compression, there are various constraints you should follow for maximal quality. MPEG splits the video up into 16x16 squares called macroblocks, each composed of 4 8x8 blocks of luma (intensity) information and two half-resolution 8x8 chroma (color) blocks (one for red-cyan axis and the other for the blue-yellow axis). Even if your movie width and height are not multiples of 16, the encoder will use enough 16x16 macroblocks to cover the whole picture area, and the extra space will go to waste. So in the interests of maximizing quality at a fixed file size, it is a bad idea to use dimensions that are not multiples of 16.

Most DVDs also have some degree of black borders at the edges. Leaving these in place will hurt quality a lot in several ways.

In addition to frequency domain transforms, MPEG-type compression uses motion vectors to represent the change from one frame to the next. Motion vectors naturally work much less efficiently for new content coming in from the edges of the picture, because it is not present in the previous frame. As long as the picture extends all the way to the edge of the encoded region, motion vectors have no problem with content moving out the edges of the picture. However, in the presence of black borders, there can be trouble:

For all of these reasons, it is recommended to fully crop black borders. Further, if there is an area of noise/distortion at the edge of the picture, cropping this will improve encoding efficiency as well. Videophile purists who want to preserve the original as close as possible may object to this cropping, but unless you plan to encode at constant quantizer, the quality you gain from cropping will considerably exceed the amount of information lost at the edges.

Recall from the previous section that the final picture size you encode should be a multiple of 16 (in both width and height). This can be achieved by cropping, scaling, or a combination of both.

When cropping, there are a few guidelines that must be followed to avoid damaging your movie. The normal YUV format, 4:2:0, stores chroma (color) information subsampled, i.e. chroma is only sampled half as often in each direction as luma (intensity) information. Observe this diagram, where L indicates luma sampling points and C chroma.

As you can see, rows and columns of the image naturally come in pairs. Thus your crop offsets and dimensions must be even numbers. If they are not, the chroma will no longer line up correctly with the luma. In theory, it is possible to crop with odd offsets, but it requires resampling the chroma which is potentially a lossy operation and not supported by the crop filter.

Further, interlaced video is sampled as follows:

As you can see, the pattern does not repeat until after 4 lines. So for interlaced video, your y-offset and height for cropping must be multiples of 4.

Native DVD resolution is 720x480 for NTSC, and 720x576 for PAL, but there is an aspect flag that specifies whether it is full-screen (4:3) or wide-screen (16:9). Many (if not most) widescreen DVDs are not strictly 16:9, and will be either 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 (cinescope). This means that there will be black bands in the video that will need to be cropped out.

MPlayer provides a crop detection filter that will determine the crop rectangle (-vf cropdetect). Run MPlayer with -vf cropdetect and it will print out the crop settings to remove the borders. You should let the movie run long enough that the whole picture area is used, in order to get accurate crop values.

Then, test the values you get with MPlayer, using the command line which was printed by cropdetect, and adjust the rectangle as needed. The rectangle filter can help by allowing you to interactively position the crop rectangle over your movie. Remember to follow the above divisibility guidelines so that you do not misalign the chroma planes.

In certain cases, scaling may be undesirable. Scaling in the vertical direction is difficult with interlaced video, and if you wish to preserve the interlacing, you should usually refrain from scaling. If you will not be scaling but you still want to use multiple-of-16 dimensions, you will have to overcrop. Do not undercrop, since black borders are very bad for encoding!

Because MPEG-4 uses 16x16 macroblocks, you will want to make sure that each dimension of the video you are encoding is a multiple of 16 or else you will be degrading quality, especially at lower bitrates. You can do this by rounding the width and height of the crop rectangle down to the nearest multiple of 16. As stated earlier, when cropping, you will want to increase the Y offset by half the difference of the old and the new height so that the resulting video is taken from the center of the frame. And because of the way DVD video is sampled, make sure the offset is an even number. (In fact, as a rule, never use odd values for any parameter when you are cropping and scaling video.) If you are not comfortable throwing a few extra pixels away, you might prefer to scale the video instead. We will look at this in our example below. You can actually let the cropdetect filter do all of the above for you, as it has an optional round parameter that is equal to 16 by default.

Also, be careful about "half black" pixels at the edges. Make sure you crop these out too, or else you will be wasting bits there that are better spent elsewhere.

After all is said and done, you will probably end up with video whose pixels are not quite 1.85:1 or 2.35:1, but rather something close to that. You could calculate the new aspect ratio manually, but MEncoder offers an option for libavcodec called autoaspect that will do this for you. Absolutely do not scale this video up in order to square the pixels unless you like to waste your hard disk space. Scaling should be done on playback, and the player will use the aspect stored in the AVI to determine the correct resolution. Unfortunately, not all players enforce this auto-scaling information, therefore you may still want to rescale.

If you will not be encoding in constant quantizer mode, you need to select a bitrate. The concept of bitrate is quite simple. It is the (average) number of bits that will be consumed to store your movie, per second. Normally bitrate is measured in kilobits (1000 bits) per second. The size of your movie on disk is the bitrate times the length of the movie in time, plus a small amount of "overhead" (see the section on the AVI container for instance). Other parameters such as scaling, cropping, etc. will not alter the file size unless you change the bitrate as well!

Bitrate does not scale proportionally to resolution. That is to say, a 320x240 file at 200 kbit/sec will not be the same quality as the same movie at 640x480 and 800 kbit/sec! There are two reasons for this:

Past guides have recommended choosing a bitrate and resolution based on a "bits per pixel" approach, but this is usually not valid due to the above reasons. A better estimate seems to be that bitrates scale proportional to the square root of resolution, so that 320x240 and 400 kbit/sec would be comparable to 640x480 at 800 kbit/sec. However this has not been verified with theoretical or empirical rigor. Further, given that movies vary greatly with regard to noise, detail, degree of motion, etc., it is futile to make general recommendations for bits per length-of-diagonal (the analog of bits per pixel, using the square root).

So far we have discussed the difficulty of choosing a bitrate and resolution.

Learning how to use MEncoder's video filters is essential to producing good encodes. All video processing is performed through the filters -- cropping, scaling, color adjustment, noise removal, sharpening, deinterlacing, telecine, inverse telecine, and deblocking, just to name a few. Along with the vast number of supported input formats, the variety of filters available in MEncoder is one of its main advantages over other similar programs.

Filters are loaded in a chain using the -vf option:

-vf filter1=options,filter2=options,...

Most filters take several numeric options separated by colons, but the syntax for options varies from filter to filter, so read the man page for details on the filters you wish to use.

Filters operate on the video in the order they are loaded. For example, the following chain:

-vf crop=688:464:12:4,scale=640:464

will first crop the 688x464 region of the picture with upper-left corner at (12,4), and then scale the result down to 640x464.

Certain filters need to be loaded at or near the beginning of the filter chain, in order to take advantage of information from the video decoder that will be lost or invalidated by other filters. The principal examples are pp (postprocessing, only when it is performing deblock or dering operations), spp (another postprocessor to remove MPEG artifacts), pullup (inverse telecine), and softpulldown (for converting soft telecine to hard telecine).

In general, you want to do as little filtering as possible to the movie in order to remain close to the original DVD source. Cropping is often necessary (as described above), but avoid to scale the video. Although scaling down is sometimes preferred to using higher quantizers, we want to avoid both these things: remember that we decided from the start to trade bits for quality.

Also, do not adjust gamma, contrast, brightness, etc. What looks good on your display may not look good on others. These adjustments should be done on playback only.

One thing you might want to do, however, is pass the video through a very light denoise filter, such as -vf hqdn3d=2:1:2. Again, it is a matter of putting those bits to better use: why waste them encoding noise when you can just add that noise back in during playback? Increasing the parameters for hqdn3d will further improve compressibility, but if you increase the values too much, you risk degrading the image visibly. The suggested values above (2:1:2) are quite conservative; you should feel free to experiment with higher values and observe the results for yourself.

Almost all movies are shot at 24 fps. Because NTSC is 30000/1001 fps, some processing must be done to this 24 fps video to make it run at the correct NTSC framerate. The process is called 3:2 pulldown, commonly referred to as telecine (because pulldown is often applied during the telecine process), and, naively described, it works by slowing the film down to 24000/1001 fps, and repeating every fourth frame.

No special processing, however, is done to the video for PAL DVDs, which run at 25 fps. (Technically, PAL can be telecined, called 2:2 pulldown, but this does not become an issue in practice.) The 24 fps film is simply played back at 25 fps. The result is that the movie runs slightly faster, but unless you are an alien, you probably will not notice the difference. Most PAL DVDs have pitch-corrected audio, so when they are played back at 25 fps things will sound right, even though the audio track (and hence the whole movie) has a running time that is 4% less than NTSC DVDs.

Because the video in a PAL DVD has not been altered, you need not worry much about framerate. The source is 25 fps, and your rip will be 25 fps. However, if you are ripping an NTSC DVD movie, you may need to apply inverse telecine.

For movies shot at 24 fps, the video on the NTSC DVD is either telecined 30000/1001, or else it is progressive 24000/1001 fps and intended to be telecined on-the-fly by a DVD player. On the other hand, TV series are usually only interlaced, not telecined. This is not a hard rule: some TV series are interlaced (such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer) whereas some are a mixture of progressive and interlaced (such as Angel, or 24).

It is highly recommended that you read the section on How to deal with telecine and interlacing in NTSC DVDs to learn how to handle the different possibilities.

However, if you are mostly just ripping movies, likely you are either dealing with 24 fps progressive or telecined video, in which case you can use the pullup filter -vf pullup,softskip.

If the movie you want to encode is interlaced (NTSC video or PAL video), you will need to choose whether you want to deinterlace or not. While deinterlacing will make your movie usable on progressive scan displays such a computer monitors and projectors, it comes at a cost: The fieldrate of 50 or 60000/1001 fields per second is halved to 25 or 30000/1001 frames per second, and roughly half of the information in your movie will be lost during scenes with significant motion.

Therefore, if you are encoding for high quality archival purposes, it is recommended not to deinterlace. You can always deinterlace the movie at playback time when displaying it on progressive scan devices. The power of currently available computers forces players to use a deinterlacing filter, which results in a slight degradation in image quality. But future players will be able to mimic the interlaced display of a TV, deinterlacing to full fieldrate and interpolating 50 or 60000/1001 entire frames per second from the interlaced video.

Special care must be taken when working with interlaced video:

With these things in mind, here is our first example:

mencoder capture.avi -mc 0 -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts \
    vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=6000:ilme:ildct:acodec=mp2:abitrate=224

Note the ilme and ildct options.

MEncoder's audio/video synchronization algorithms were designed with the intention of recovering files with broken sync. However, in some cases they can cause unnecessary skipping and duplication of frames, and possibly slight A/V desync, when used with proper input (of course, A/V sync issues apply only if you process or copy the audio track while transcoding the video, which is strongly encouraged). Therefore, you may have to switch to basic A/V sync with the -mc 0 option, or put this in your ~/.mplayer/mencoder config file, as long as you are only working with good sources (DVD, TV capture, high quality MPEG-4 rips, etc) and not broken ASF/RM/MOV files.

If you want to further guard against strange frame skips and duplication, you can use both -mc 0 and -noskip. This will prevent all A/V sync, and copy frames one-to-one, so you cannot use it if you will be using any filters that unpredictably add or drop frames, or if your input file has variable framerate! Therefore, using -noskip is not in general recommended.

The so-called "three-pass" audio encoding which MEncoder supports has been reported to cause A/V desync. This will definitely happen if it is used in conjunction with certain filters, therefore, it is now recommended not to use three-pass audio mode. This feature is only left for compatibility purposes and for expert users who understand when it is safe to use and when it is not. If you have never heard of three-pass mode before, forget that we even mentioned it!

There have also been reports of A/V desync when encoding from stdin with MEncoder. Do not do this! Always use a file or CD/DVD/etc device as input.

Which video codec is best to choose depends on several factors, like size, quality, streamability, usability and popularity, some of which widely depend on personal taste and technical constraints.

Please refer to the section selecting codecs and container formats to get a list of supported codecs.

Audio is a much simpler problem to solve: if you care about quality, just leave it as is. Even AC-3 5.1 streams are at most 448Kbit/s, and they are worth every bit. You might be tempted to transcode the audio to high quality Vorbis, but just because you do not have an A/V receiver for AC-3 pass-through today does not mean you will not have one tomorrow. Future-proof your DVD rips by preserving the AC-3 stream. You can keep the AC-3 stream either by copying it directly into the video stream during the encoding. You can also extract the AC-3 stream in order to mux it into containers such as NUT or Matroska.

mplayer source_file.vob -aid 129 -dumpaudio -dumpfile sound.ac3

will dump into the file sound.ac3 the audio track number 129 from the file source_file.vob (NB: DVD VOB files usually use a different audio numbering, which means that the VOB audio track 129 is the 2nd audio track of the file).

But sometimes you truly have no choice but to further compress the sound so that more bits can be spent on the video. Most people choose to compress audio with either MP3 or Vorbis audio codecs. While the latter is a very space-efficient codec, MP3 is better supported by hardware players, although this trend is changing.

Do not use -nosound when encoding a file with audio, even if you will be encoding and muxing audio separately later. Though it may work in ideal cases, using -nosound is likely to hide some problems in your encoding command line setting. In other words, having a soundtrack during your encode assures you that, provided you do not see messages such as “Too many audio packets in the buffer”, you will be able to get proper sync.

You need to have MEncoder process the sound. You can for example copy the original soundtrack during the encode with -oac copy or convert it to a "light" 4 kHz mono WAV PCM with -oac pcm -channels 1 -srate 4000. Otherwise, in some cases, it will generate a video file that will not sync with the audio. Such cases are when the number of video frames in the source file does not match up to the total length of audio frames or whenever there are discontinuities/splices where there are missing or extra audio frames. The correct way to handle this kind of problem is to insert silence or cut audio at these points. However MPlayer cannot do that, so if you demux the AC-3 audio and encode it with a separate app (or dump it to PCM with MPlayer), the splices will be left incorrect and the only way to correct them is to drop/duplicate video frames at the splice. As long as MEncoder sees the audio when it is encoding the video, it can do this dropping/duping (which is usually OK since it takes place at full black/scene change), but if MEncoder cannot see the audio, it will just process all frames as-is and they will not fit the final audio stream when you for example merge your audio and video track into a Matroska file.

First of all, you will have to convert the DVD sound into a WAV file that the audio codec can use as input. For example:

mplayer source_file.vob -ao pcm:file=destination_sound.wav \
    -vc dummy -aid 1 -vo null

will dump the second audio track from the file source_file.vob into the file destination_sound.wav. You may want to normalize the sound before encoding, as DVD audio tracks are commonly recorded at low volumes. You can use the tool normalize for instance, which is available in most distributions. If you are using Windows, a tool such as BeSweet can do the same job. You will compress in either Vorbis or MP3. For example:

oggenc -q1 destination_sound.wav

will encode destination_sound.wav with the encoding quality 1, which is roughly equivalent to 80Kb/s, and is the minimum quality at which you should encode if you care about quality. Please note that MEncoder currently cannot mux Vorbis audio tracks into the output file because it only supports AVI and MPEG containers as an output, each of which may lead to audio/video playback synchronization problems with some players when the AVI file contain VBR audio streams such as Vorbis. Do not worry, this document will show you how you can do that with third party programs.

Now that you have encoded your video, you will most likely want to mux it with one or more audio tracks into a movie container, such as AVI, MPEG, Matroska or NUT. MEncoder is currently only able to natively output audio and video into MPEG and AVI container formats. for example:

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy  -o output_movie.avi \
    -audiofile input_audio.mp2 input_video.avi

This would merge the video file input_video.avi and the audio file input_audio.mp2 into the AVI file output_movie.avi. This command works with MPEG-1 layer I, II and III (more commonly known as MP3) audio, WAV and a few other audio formats too.

MEncoder features experimental support for libavformat, which is a library from the FFmpeg project that supports muxing and demuxing a variety of containers. For example:

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o output_movie.asf -audiofile input_audio.mp2 \
    input_video.avi -of lavf -lavfopts format=asf

This will do the same thing as the previous example, except that the output container will be ASF. Please note that this support is highly experimental (but getting better every day), and will only work if you compiled MPlayer with the support for libavformat enabled (which means that a pre-packaged binary version will not work in most cases).

mkvmerge -o output.mkv input_video.avi input_audio1.mp3 input_audio2.ac3

What is telecine?  If you do not understand much of what is written in this document, read the Wikipedia entry on telecine. It is an understandable and reasonably comprehensive description of what telecine is.

A note about the numbers.  Many documents, including the article linked above, refer to the fields per second value of NTSC video as 59.94 and the corresponding frames per second values as 29.97 (for telecined and interlaced) and 23.976 (for progressive). For simplicity, some documents even round these numbers to 60, 30, and 24.

Strictly speaking, all those numbers are approximations. Black and white NTSC video was exactly 60 fields per second, but 60000/1001 was later chosen to accommodate color data while remaining compatible with contemporary black and white televisions. Digital NTSC video (such as on a DVD) is also 60000/1001 fields per second. From this, interlaced and telecined video are derived to be 30000/1001 frames per second; progressive video is 24000/1001 frames per second.

Older versions of the MEncoder documentation and many archived mailing list posts refer to 59.94, 29.97, and 23.976. All MEncoder documentation has been updated to use the fractional values, and you should use them too.

-ofps 23.976 is incorrect. -ofps 24000/1001 should be used instead.

How telecine is used.  All video intended to be displayed on an NTSC television set must be 60000/1001 fields per second. Made-for-TV movies and shows are often filmed directly at 60000/1001 fields per second, but the majority of cinema is filmed at 24 or 24000/1001 frames per second. When cinematic movie DVDs are mastered, the video is then converted for television using a process called telecine.

On a DVD, the video is never actually stored as 60000/1001 fields per second. For video that was originally 60000/1001, each pair of fields is combined to form a frame, resulting in 30000/1001 frames per second. Hardware DVD players then read a flag embedded in the video stream to determine whether the odd- or even-numbered lines should form the first field.

Usually, 24000/1001 frames per second content stays as it is when encoded for a DVD, and the DVD player must perform telecining on-the-fly. Sometimes, however, the video is telecined before being stored on the DVD; even though it was originally 24000/1001 frames per second, it becomes 60000/1001 fields per second. When it is stored on the DVD, pairs of fields are combined to form 30000/1001 frames per second.

When looking at individual frames formed from 60000/1001 fields per second video, telecined or otherwise, interlacing is clearly visible wherever there is any motion, because one field (say, the even-numbered lines) represents a moment in time 1/(60000/1001) seconds later than the other. Playing interlaced video on a computer looks ugly both because the monitor is higher resolution and because the video is shown frame-after-frame instead of field-after-field.

As I mentioned in the beginning, example MEncoder lines below are not meant to actually be used; they only demonstrate the minimum parameters to properly encode each category.

mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -ovc lavc -ofps 24000/1001

The first column contains the codec names that should be passed after the vcodec config, like: -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4

mencoder dvd://2 -o title2.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -oac copy

The first column contains the codec names that should be passed after the acodec option, like: -lavcopts acodec=ac3

mencoder dvd://2 -o title2.avi -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=ac3 -ovc copy

Contrary to libavcodec's video codecs, its audio codecs do not make a wise usage of the bits they are given as they lack some minimal psychoacoustic model (if at all) which most other codec implementations feature. However, note that all these audio codecs are very fast and work out-of-the-box everywhere MEncoder has been compiled with libavcodec (which is the case most of time), and do not depend on external libraries.

Ideally, you would probably want to be able to just tell the encoder to switch into "high quality" mode and move on. That would probably be nice, but unfortunately hard to implement as different encoding options yield different quality results depending on the source material. That is because compression depends on the visual properties of the video in question. For example, Anime and live action have very different properties and thus require different options to obtain optimum encoding. The good news is that some options should never be left out, like mbd=2, trell, and v4mv. See below for a detailed description of common encoding options.

The following settings are examples of different encoding option combinations that affect the speed vs quality tradeoff at the same target bitrate.

All the encoding settings were tested on a 720x448 @30000/1001 fps video sample, the target bitrate was 900kbps, and the machine was an AMD-64 3400+ at 2400 MHz in 64 bits mode. Each encoding setting features the measured encoding speed (in frames per second) and the PSNR loss (in dB) compared to the "very high quality" setting. Please understand that depending on your source, your machine type and development advancements, you may get very different results.

With this feature of libavcodec you are able to set custom inter (I-frames/keyframes) and intra (P-frames/predicted frames) matrices. It is supported by many of the codecs: mpeg1video and mpeg2video are reported as working.

A typical usage of this feature is to set the matrices preferred by the KVCD specifications.

The KVCD "Notch" Quantization Matrix:

Intra:

 8  9 12 22 26 27 29 34
 9 10 14 26 27 29 34 37
12 14 18 27 29 34 37 38
22 26 27 31 36 37 38 40
26 27 29 36 39 38 40 48
27 29 34 37 38 40 48 58
29 34 37 38 40 48 58 69
34 37 38 40 48 58 69 79

Inter:

16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30
18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32
20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34
22 24 26 30 32 32 34 36
24 26 28 32 34 34 36 38
26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40
28 30 32 34 36 38 42 42
30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44

Usage:

mencoder input.avi -o output.avi -oac copy -ovc lavc \
    -lavcopts inter_matrix=...:intra_matrix=...

mencoder input.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts \
vcodec=mpeg2video:intra_matrix=8,9,12,22,26,27,29,34,9,10,14,26,27,29,34,37,\
12,14,18,27,29,34,37,38,22,26,27,31,36,37,38,40,26,27,29,36,39,38,40,48,27,\
29,34,37,38,40,48,58,29,34,37,38,40,48,58,69,34,37,38,40,48,58,69,79\
:inter_matrix=16,18,20,22,24,26,28,30,18,20,22,24,26,28,30,32,20,22,24,26,\
28,30,32,34,22,24,26,30,32,32,34,36,24,26,28,32,34,34,36,38,26,28,30,32,34,\
36,38,40,28,30,32,34,36,38,42,42,30,32,34,36,38,40,42,44 -oac copy -o svcd.mpg

So, you have just bought your shiny new copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (widescreen edition, of course), and you want to rip this DVD so that you can add it to your Home Theatre PC. This is a region 1 DVD, so it is NTSC. The example below will still apply to PAL, except you will omit -ofps 24000/1001 (because the output framerate is the same as the input framerate), and of course the crop dimensions will be different.

After running mplayer dvd://1, we follow the process detailed in the section How to deal with telecine and interlacing in NTSC DVDs and discover that it is 24000/1001 fps progressive video, which means that we need not use an inverse telecine filter, such as pullup or filmdint.

Next, we want to determine the appropriate crop rectangle, so we use the cropdetect filter:

mplayer dvd://1 -vf cropdetect

Make sure you seek to a fully filled frame (such as a bright scene, past the opening credits and logos), and you will see in MPlayer's console output:

crop area: X: 0..719  Y: 57..419  (-vf crop=720:362:0:58)

We then play the movie back with this filter to test its correctness:

mplayer dvd://1 -vf crop=720:362:0:58

And we see that it looks perfectly fine. Next, we ensure the width and height are a multiple of 16. The width is fine, however the height is not. Since we did not fail 7th grade math, we know that the nearest multiple of 16 lower than 362 is 352.

We could just use crop=720:352:0:58, but it would be nice to take a little off the top and a little off the bottom so that we retain the center. We have shrunk the height by 10 pixels, but we do not want to increase the y-offset by 5-pixels since that is an odd number and will adversely affect quality. Instead, we will increase the y-offset by 4 pixels:

mplayer dvd://1 -vf crop=720:352:0:62

Another reason to shave pixels from both the top and the bottom is that we ensure we have eliminated any half-black pixels if they exist. Note that if your video is telecined, make sure the pullup filter (or whichever inverse telecine filter you decide to use) appears in the filter chain before you crop. If it is interlaced, deinterlace before cropping. (If you choose to preserve the interlaced video, then make sure your vertical crop offset is a multiple of 4.)

If you are really concerned about losing those 10 pixels, you might prefer instead to scale the dimensions down to the nearest multiple of 16. The filter chain would look like:

-vf crop=720:362:0:58,scale=720:352

Scaling the video down like this will mean that some small amount of detail is lost, though it probably will not be perceptible. Scaling up will result in lower quality (unless you increase the bitrate). Cropping discards those pixels altogether. It is a tradeoff that you will want to consider for each circumstance. For example, if the DVD video was made for television, you might want to avoid vertical scaling, since the line sampling corresponds to the way the content was originally recorded.

On inspection, we see that our movie has a fair bit of action and high amounts of detail, so we pick 2400Kbit for our bitrate.

We are now ready to do the two pass encode. Pass one:

mencoder dvd://1 -ofps 24000/1001 -oac copy -o Harry_Potter_2.avi -ovc lavc \
    -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2400:v4mv:mbd=2:trell:cmp=3:subcmp=3:autoaspect:vpass=1 \
    -vf pullup,softskip,crop=720:352:0:62,hqdn3d=2:1:2

And pass two is the same, except that we specify vpass=2:

mencoder dvd://1 -ofps 24000/1001 -oac copy -o Harry_Potter_2.avi -ovc lavc \
    -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2400:v4mv:mbd=2:trell:cmp=3:subcmp=3:autoaspect:vpass=2 \
    -vf pullup,softskip,crop=720:352:0:62,hqdn3d=2:1:2

The options v4mv:mbd=2:trell will greatly increase the quality at the expense of encoding time. There is little reason to leave these options out when the primary goal is quality. The options cmp=3:subcmp=3 select a comparison function that yields higher quality than the defaults. You might try experimenting with this parameter (refer to the man page for the possible values) as different functions can have a large impact on quality depending on the source material. For example, if you find libavcodec produces too much blocky artifacts, you could try selecting the experimental NSSE as comparison function via *cmp=10.

For this movie, the resulting AVI will be 138 minutes long and nearly 3GB. And because you said that file size does not matter, this is a perfectly acceptable size. However, if you had wanted it smaller, you could try a lower bitrate. Increasing bitrates have diminishing returns, so while we might clearly see an improvement from 1800Kbit to 2000Kbit, it might not be so noticeable above 2000Kbit. Feel free to experiment until you are happy.

Because we passed the source video through a denoise filter, you may want to add some of it back during playback. This, along with the spp post-processing filter, drastically improves the perception of quality and helps eliminate blocky artifacts in the video. With MPlayer's autoq option, you can vary the amount of post-processing done by the spp filter depending on available CPU. Also, at this point, you may want to apply gamma and/or color correction to best suit your display. For example:

mplayer Harry_Potter_2.avi -vf spp,noise=9ah:5ah,eq2=1.2 -autoq 3

Please begin by reviewing the Xvid section of MPlayer's man page. This section is intended to be a supplement to the man page.

The Xvid default settings are already a good tradeoff between speed and quality, therefore you can safely stick to them if the following section puzzles you.

Xvid supports encoding profiles through the profile option, which are used to impose restrictions on the properties of the Xvid video stream such that it will be playable on anything which supports the chosen profile. The restrictions relate to resolutions, bitrates and certain MPEG-4 features. The following table shows what each profile supports.