MPlayer 1.5 Video Player Comes with Built-in Skin Support

MPlayer 1.5 comes with small fixes to make sure it still compiles against modern versions of FFmpeg. Here's what's new!
MPlayer 1.5 Video Player

MPlayer (The Movie Player) is a very popular movie player available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. In the past, MPlayer was the best video player for a long time.

It has built-in support for the most common video and audio formats, as well as having a powerful filter system for video and audio manipulation. In addition, MPlayer has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles, and visual feedback for keyboard controls.

Related: 5 Best Linux Video Players on Which You Can Rely on

The previous MPlayer 1.4 version was released all the way back in April 2019. Now, almost 3 years later, MPlayer 1.5 is out.

MPlayer 1.5 Highlights

MPlayer 1.5 Video Player

MPlayer is dependent and relies heavily on FFmpeg, which is a free and open-source software consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams.

In fact, MPlayer can play any format supported by FFmpeg libraries. Because ffmpeg12vpdau is no longer supported by FFmpeg, MPlayer 1.5 is now optimized to rely on the separate ffmpeg1vpdau and ffmpeg2vdpau libraries.

Moving on, live555 support is deprecated and disabled by default in MPLayer 1.5, and will be removed in future versions.

On the GUI side, MPlayer 1.5 brings several changes that we will list below:

  • MPlayer 1.5 now provides a built-in skin so that the GUI can be used even without an installed skin.
  • The wrongly sized video window after leaving fullscreen mode has been fixed.
  • Command-line option -fs (full screen) is now recognized in addition to the GUI option load_fullscreen.

Keep in mind, that MPlayer is primarily controlled via the command line, although the developers also make a GUI, which you can customize with dozens of available skins. In other words, you will have to utilize the terminal in order to play a video.

Finally, let’s mention that a new configuration option --enable-nls has been added for Native Language Support at runtime (currently only for the GUI and enabled by default for it).

For more information about all changes in MPlayer 1.5, you can refer to the changelog file or visit the project’s website.

Bobby Borisov

Bobby Borisov

Bobby, an editor-in-chief at Linuxiac, is a Linux professional with over 20 years of experience. With a strong focus on Linux and open-source software, he has worked as a Senior Linux System Administrator, Software Developer, and DevOps Engineer for small and large multinational companies.

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