MPlayer Is Getting Closer To Version 1.0 Too

Written by Michael Larabel in Multimedia on 29 January 2011 at 07:22 PM EST. 36 Comments
MULTIMEDIA
Version 1.0 of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries was released just hours ago after being in development for a long while. It surprised a number of people that EFL finally hit version 1.0, but here's another surprise: MPlayer is getting closer to version 1.0 too.

MPlayer has been in development for more than a decade and is one of the widely-used and leading multimedia Linux video players, but it has yet to reach version 1.0. The first release candidate for MPlayer came in 2006, a second release candidate in 2007, and then a third release candidate was made available just last year. Being pushed out to the MPlayer FTP servers this Saturday is a fourth release candidate.

It doesn't appear that any release announcement is out there yet for MPlayer 1.0 RC4, but it can be downloaded right now from their FTP server. Obviously there's many, many changes to it since the last snapshot (1.0 RC3) from last May. A change-log file is included with the source package, but since it doesn't appear to be found anywhere else, it's also embedded below for convenience.

MPlayer 1.0 is code-named "Yes We Can" and notable changes include support fopr a number of new decoders, JPEG 2000 support, support for external libmpeg2 / libmpg123 libraries, Google VP8 encoding and decoding support through the libvpx wrapper and the native decoder in FFmpeg, greater Blu-ray support, NVIDIA VDPAU support for MPEG-4 ASP, and better "out of the box" support for compiling MPlayer on ARM. With libbluray, MPlayer 1.0 RC4 supports play-back of un-encrypted Blu-ray video discs.

There is no word if this is planned to be the last release candidate or when 1.0 stable may finally be released. With more of these long-term, prominent open-source projects nearing version 1.0, plus other upcoming breakthroughs like Valve's Steam / Source Engine for Linux, is the "year of the Linux desktop" finally upon us?
GUI:
- Changes towards removing the GUI
- The GUI will no longer display any error or warning messages.
- Special GUI slave commands (gui_*) were removed, along with the related key bindings.

Decoders:
- YUY2 Lossless Codec (YLC0) via binary DLL
- Truemotion RT codec (TR20) via binary DLL
- Nogantech Codec (NTN1 and NTN2) via binary DLL
- add new FourCCs (m1v1, yuvs, VYUY, Y42B, V422, YUNV, UYNV, UYNY, uyv1, 2Vu1, P422, HDYC, IJLV, MVJP) TwoCCs (0xA106, 0x6c75, 0xAAC0, 0x55005354) to existing decoders
- AMR now handled via OpenCORE decoder
- updated Windows Media Screen Codec (MSS1, MSS2) via binary DLL
- CoreAVC H.264 decoder via binary DLL (Windows only)
- Kega Game video codec (KGV1) via binary DLL
- SoftLab-NSK Forward MPEG-2 I-frames (SLIF) via binary DLL
- JPEG 2000 support via OpenJPEG
- internal liba52 copy removed
- CineForm HD (CFHD) via binary DLL
- VP8 en-/decoding through libvpx wrapper and native decoder in FFmpeg
- support for external libmpeg2 added
- hardware MPEG decoder priority lowered
- external libmpg123 support

Demuxers:
- Mostly fixed timing issues with some H.264 (PAFF) samples
- Matroska and Ogg demuxers switched to use libavformat by default. Report issues and use -demuxer ogg and -demuxer mkv to work around them.
- support for TrueHD in Blu-ray streams in libmpdemux
- more Blu-ray codec support with lavf
- fix length in ASF/WMV files
- support ISDB-Tb DVB streams

Filters:
- remove vf_yuy2, functionality is replaced by -vf format=yuv2
- remove vf_rgb2bgr, functionality is replaced by sws and vf_format

Streaming:
- Support for unencrypted Blu-ray playback through libbluray. Use it through: mplayer br:////path/to/disc

Drivers:
- -vo yuv4mpeg:interlaced no longer does its own interlaced RGB->YUV conversion. Use -vf scale=::1 to keep the same behavior and report if there are any issues with that.
- X11: Window manager chooses Window position by default. Add geometry=50%:50% to your configuration to get the old behavior.
- -vo md5sum md5 calculation changed so output matches FFmpeg's -f framemd5
- Support for more formats in OpenGL video output drivers (different YUV subsampling, 16 bit per component)
- Selectable YUV to RGB conversion standard for -vo gl (-vo gl:colorspace=...:levelconv=...)
- -vo gl now tries to use yuv=2 by default if possible
- -vo gl:stereo=... for experimental stereo (3D) support
- -vo matrixview finally added
- add OS/2 KAI audio driver (-ao kai)

Other:
- -nosub option for disabling auto-selected subtitles
- support for displaying subs in the terminal (FIXME)
- support for subtitles with audio-only files
- support for right-to-left languages with embedded subtitles
- support for UTF-16 encoded external subtitles
- support for 8 channel audio
- sync dvd:// and dvdnav:// features
- support for MPEG-4 ASP in VDPAU video output (non-B-frame only)
- support for live and non-live DVB teletext with demuxer lavf
- -name, -title and -use-filename-title options for MPlayer
- support for stream handling via FFmpeg, in particular RTMP and RTSP (use e.g. ffmpeg://http://example.com/test)
- experimental support for external libass, configure with --disable-ass-internal
- better support for 16-bit-per-component formats and formats with alpha channel
- better out-of-the-box support for compiling for ARM, IA64, MinGW32 and MinGW-w64, MinGW has ASLR enabled with recent enough binutils
- libdvdcss synced with upstream Subversion snapshot

MEncoder:
- add -tsprog for demuxer lavf
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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