MPlayer 1.1 Magically Surfaces With New Features

The last official release of MPlayer was version 1.0-rc4 and it came in January of 2011. Since then there's been no official releases so after more than a decade, MPlayer 1.0 has yet to be released, but being quietly available now is... MPlayer 1.1.

Being uploaded to the MPlayer FTP server last week was a straight-up MPlayer 1.1 release, not a release candidate or other pre-release flavor. The upload occurred on the 2nd of June, but still there is no announcement via the mplayer-announce mailing list (no activity there since January of 2011), nor has this been widely mentioned elsewhere. However, the 1.1 files are genuine.

Well, after some further digging, it's briefly mentioned on mplayer-users by Reimar Döffinger. "I uploaded tarballs I want to make the 1.1 release (they will only be renamed, unless there are critical issues). If the usual people can step up to sign them that would be welcome, currently they only have my signature in the .asc file. In addition updates for download page, news page and a mail for the -announce list are needed, volunteers would be welcome, otherwise I'll try to come up with something, I hope by tomorrow at the latest in that case." Well, that was four days ago, and there's still no announcement.

A change-log can be found embedded within the source package itself (and embedded at the end of this article for easy reference), but some of the prominent changes compared to MPlayer 1.0-rc4 from last year include: experimental support for using binary Quicktime codecs, experimental support for OpenGL ES 1.0, support for PGS (BluRay-compatible), DVB and XSUB subtitles, and a Wine port. MPlayer 1.1 is codenamed "We gave up on 1.0."

Decoders:
* FFmpeg AAC decoder is now preferred over libfaad2 and the internal libfaad2 forked copy has been removed in its favor

Demuxers:
* experimental support for using binary Quicktime codecs with -demuxer lavf.
* correct runtime and average bitrate for VBR (variable bitrate) MP3

Filters:
* delogo: allow to change the rectangle based on the time.
* lavfi: libavfilter filter graphs (experimental).

Other:
* support adding noise at output resolution with -vo gl:noise-strength=8
* experimental support for OpenGL ES 1.0 in -vo gl
* support for PGS (BluRay-compatible), DVB and XSUB subtitles.
* af_cmdline slave command to change e.g. audio equalizer options at runtime.
* vo x11: don't hide or show cursor any more if attached to an existing window (-wid)
* try reconnecting network streams e.g. after network timeouts
* lots of bug fixes as always (and surely a few new bugs, too :-( )

GUI: Support for the GUI continues.
* numerous fixes, improvements and updates
* UTF-8 support
* all skin messages available as slave commands (gui )
* fancy new icon

Ports:
* Wine (see DOCS/tech/crosscompile.txt)

MEncoder:
* -force-key-frames option to set explicit seek points.

Besides VLC and the other open-source media players out there, MPlayer2 exists as a fork of the MPlayer code-base since last year with a different set of features.