Download MPlayer 1.0 pre6

MPlayer has released prerelease 6 of version 1.0. The open source media player is cross platform and plays movies in MPEG, VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ or PVA format. An up-to-date list of supported codecs can be found on the MPlayer site† The full changelog is here The announcement below summarizes all the changes:

The most important changes are support for a seemingly infinite number of new codecs and important fixes for some of the old ones. The experimental wavelet-based snow video codec by Michael Niedermayer deserves a special mention. It is very promising, maybe this is what the future of video encoding looks like. We also added support for encoding to H.264 with x264 and to MP2 through toolame.

Apart from that the unbelievable has happened and all the myriad of available options are finally documented. If you cannot find it in the documentation it simply does not exist, so RTFM! If you have a slow machine you should check out low resolution decoding with libavcodec (-vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=0-3). With some luck you should be able to play DVDs and MPEG-4 movies. Mac OS X has had some nice improvements with VCD and Real/Helix codec (get new codec packages) support among others. On Windows there is a shiny new DirectSound audio output and support for the -wid option should allow building browser plugins. If you use the polypaudio sound server there is now an audio output module for you. The remaining old audio plugins have been converted to audio filters so expect audio plugins to disappear in the next release. Already gone are the old alsa9 and alsa1x audio output drivers, use alsa instead.

As usual there were too many bug fixes to mention. They are all over the place, so MPlayer should run smoother and more stable than ever. A notable one is that length and position are now displayed for MOV files as well and that MPlayer’s output is slowly becoming less verbose.