I am curious as to what people see in MPlayer, from everything that I can tell, xine does everything better :/

- DVD support is much better in xine (menus in particular)
- Playlists maneuver much better in xine for huge directories, has a playlist window to go through, unlike MPlayer
- Skins in xine look better, the default blows away almost all of the ones in MPlayer

This might be just for gmplayer, but I don't know.... What is it about MPlayer that people like? What features do you like better than xine?

The same codecs work for xine & MPlayer, so it can't be that.... I can't figure it out....

Which do you like?

i use mplayer just cuz i like it, but i use xine for DVD playing.

I like mplayer keyboard shortcuts, but you're right about the dvd thing
edit: I also like mplayer for my tv, not to mention mencoder!

What's wrong with xine's keyboard shortcuts?

F for fullscreen, G for hide/show gui
Space for Play/Pause (obviously)
PgUp/Down for prev/next file

Besides that I use LIRC so my remote is better than the keyboard

Ahh, I don't have a TV tuner, I just use P2P for all the good stuff Not much on TV anymore that I like except South Park, which I can get off BitTorrent 30 minutes after it airs, and Family Guy, which won't air until 2005 again and probably just as easy to get off BitTorrent as SP.

What's mencoder?

mplayer has + & - for lipsync, 1,2,3 ... 8,9,0 for adjustments and arrows and pgup/pgdn for searching. I'm just used to it now I suppose!

mencoder can encode stuff like video streams, avi, dvd whatever (I think!) I haven't used it much though :-^

xine has n and m for lipsync (home for reset), left & right arrow for searching, Ctrl+# for percentage of stream, and I don't know about adjustments but I'm sure it has those somewhere too.

MPlayer makes tea and pleasures you while your wife is out*






*not really

One function that I love with mplayer, is the possibility to use a joypad/stick general controls, as sound and vide position. That sounds is silly, but if you've got a wireless USB pad like mine, it makes a create remote control . Xine is also a good player.

Now, MPlayer looks very newbish-made when it comes down to DVD playback... Not only the lack of DVD-menus' suck, but here in Sweden, usually the DVD's has other language/subs, so when I try to play those DVD's, even after chosen Swedish as sub, it displays Finish or danish so I'm forced to chose yet another language in the classic "trial and error" (as German) to get Swedish sub... Very, very bad in my honest opinion.

I don't really have any specific reason to choose mplayer over xine....it's just that I had installed the xine package with my suse installation and it sucked for DVD, so I installed mplayer and haven't had any complaints. I also like that it works with framebuffer

What?

MPlayer has horrible support for DVD, no menus at all, and according to that guy above bad language support as well, but xine has almost perfect DVD playback.... Are you sure you didn't get them confused?

and what about mplayer plugin for embedded videos? i know there is a xine plugin, but i don't know if it is still maintained and that's the main reason i use both of them

I like either fine. I don't play DVD's so I don't kn ow about that. But for all else I find bothe of them equally good. Except for the time when in RH 9.0 mplayer won't play my mp3's and freeze midway.

But again XINE did no better

On a more serious note (than my last post) mplayer seems to play more files with a greater accuracy, a few files I have dl'd are corrupt in some way ie. green dots on the screen or just will not seek properly; I will always keep mplayer on my system because it somehow plays even the most corrupted of files.
And yes, unless the film is on "title1", mplayer is poor for dvd use.

To me, Menu support IS horrible support!! DVD menu's... what an utter waste of my life they are. it's so so nice to just be able to jump stright to the main even tfrom a command line.

MPlayer is so versatile it's insane. I think that it's just bizzare to want to use a UI for watchign a DVD... you spend 2 hours solid staring at the film, and using mplayer about 3 seconds to load it... why should anyone care about skins and clicking on pointless buttons when you can type in one single command and WHAM! it's playing.... no need to touch anything anymore.

I will admit that mplayer does have some dvd issues that I can't convince the mplayer developers to really look at, and the way it deal with the streams is less than ideal imho, but these are prety insignificant when looked at what mplayer can do... it's just so flexible....

But then I just plain hate Xine... I'm proud to think i've played a not-so-small part in making LQ largely MPlayer based!

amen.