MPlayer as an mpg viewer
 

Hello all
I've just installed Suse 10.1 on my Dell laptop and all went well until I tried to view a mpg video. Xine, RealPlayer and totem all gave me an error about a 'mpg' component not found. Having browsed this forum, most answers too this type of question sugested to try MPlayer, so I installed it and yes, I was able to view my video :-)

The trouble I have with MPlayer is that I can't drag&drop a video in MPlayer (I'm using Gnome rather than KDE, that might be why) and that if MPlayer is already running and I try to open another video file from Nautilus, I get the error message:

Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device

My conclusion is that I'm not suppose to run two instances of MPlayer at the same time.

So my question(s) is(are)
1) Can I enable drag&drop on MPlayer in a Gnome environment?
2) Is their a way to tell MPlayer to only use one instance. If an instance is already running, use that one?
3) And finally, and maybe most importantly, how do I get my other players (xine, real,...) to pick up the 'mpg' component (codec)? I've also installed w32-codecs and they all seam to be their (in /etc/lib/win32 a /etc/lib/codec and /etc/local/lib/codec soft link to it).

Many thanks to anybody how's able to answer any of those questions...

w.

PS: I understand their is an issue with licenses behind this whole nightmare of codecs, but if somebody could also brief me on what exactly is going on, I would appreciate.

mplayer is just an executable. If you are referring to UI interfaces, you can look at gmplayer or kmplayer. But, they don't invoke all the features of the command-line mplayer.
No. It works for me on Red Hat WS. I open two terminals and run two movies, each run my mplayer.

Not sure on the codecs part.

Well maybe you're talking about the executable for GUI version (gmplayer). If you want to use drag and drop, u should use KDE instead of Gnome.
And about the multiple instance problem, I am suffering with it too. I will post the solution here if I could find any.

Using KDE in SuSE 10.1

I just tried opening more then one video file in mplayer, there does not seem to be a limit on how many I can open, I tested by opening four different files in four separate instances of mplayer, they all opened and played simultaneously.

That's dependent on the features of the hardware and it's drivers. My sound card does not allow simultaneous playback of 2 videos / audios.