MplayerXP

MPlayerXP is branch of well known mplayer which is based on new (thread based) core. The new core provides better CPU utilization and excellently improves performance of video decoding.
MPlayerXP is cross-platform, but requires Cygwin on Microsoft Windows.
History
The idea to create MPlayerXP was born after long participation of the author of the project with well-know that days mplayerhq. In 1998-2000 years the world of linux same as many other unix-based systems had lack of any multimedia related projects. There were somehow working mpeg-players and widely-popular mpg123 player. mplayerhq was designed to cover many lacks in this space. But mplayerhq was single-thread player which was able to use only 1 CPU. Furthermore, it was not able to provide smooth playback on uniprocessor systems due lacks in its design. In 2002, the author of MPlayerXP stared own project. It was the same mplayerhq with perfectly redesigned core which was able to achive smooth playback even on uniprocessor systems and decode video movies faster on SMP. The author of MPlayerXP was amazed when found out that core of mplayerhq is ready for threads. It seems that author of mplayerhq simply forked thread-based project and just removed all threads from it. Well, after long disputes with mplayerhq team author became develop own project. Many users kept their loyality to mplayerhq, but some users supported the new thread-based player. Many users left mplayerhq and MPlayerXP and became to be users of xine.
In present days, many users who left MPlayerXP still and still are returning to this project. Smoothness of video-playback which is being provided by MPlayerXP attracts them. From other side, in our days almost all modern computers have multi-core processors and mplayerhq is not able to load them effectively. Today, almost all modern notebooks have at least dual-core CPU and by rumors some models of smartphones and mobile device have at least 2 core. From this point of view MPlayerXP looks most progressive and most ready player for tomorrow's computer's needs.
Supported media formats
* Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs
* Container formats: 3GP, AVI, ASF, FLV, Matroska, , MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia
*Video formats: Cinepak, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV
*Audio formats: AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Intel Music Coder, Monkey's Audio, MP3, Musepack, RealAudio, Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA
*Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, Sami, SRT, SubViewer, VOBsub, VPlayer
MPlayerXP also supports a variety of different output drivers for displaying video, including X11, Vidix, VESA, Framebuffer, SDL. It can also be used to display TV through TV-out of video-card.
Legal issues
Most video and audio formats are supported natively through the libavcodec library of the FFmpeg project. For those formats where no open source decoder has been implemented yet MPlayerXP relies on binary codecs. It can use Windows DLLs directly with the help of a DLL loader forked from avifile (which itself forked its loader from the Wine project).
The combination of CSS decryption software and implementation of formats covered by software patents places a fully-functional MPlayerXP in the legal bind shared by most open source multimedia players.

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See Also

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