Could someone explain the big deal about Mplayer? I don't understand why so many people bother to download/compile/use it. Maybe it does things that I just don't have needs for, I don't know? I find xine plays all my videos just fine. I really appreciate with xine how you can just hit "f" and "g" (for fullscreen and gui toggle) without having to hit alt or control etc.)

This is genuine. I am not making fun or condescending. I feel like I should be using Mplayer judging by everyone else's preferences.

I'm sure that's not the intention, you are free to use whichever player satisfies your needs.

Just because Mplayer appears to have heavy support doesn't make it mandatory that you should be using it also.

I use Mplayer for my music and video. It's not a cult or anything. It's just good software. I have used Xmms, Amarok, kaffiene, and others and they are all fine, but just find mplayer more versital.

I can play music and video, with or without a GUI and run directly from command line. Great for scripting. Can control Play, FF, Skip, Pause, functions directly from the keyboard. Also the playlist is standard .txt and can be aranged to play any sequence I want or load any number of custom lists. Mplayer just seems to follow what linux is all about. <Options>

KC

I use xine-lib with Kaffeine as the frontend in KDE and totem as the frontend in GNOME. I prefer Xine over MPLayer, but its just a personal preference, so if you feel that xine does the job well for you then thats fine and stick with it. If however you feel like you need to try something else, then there is always the option of using mplayer, videolan or ogle.

cool, thanks for the responses

when i was using RH9 i liked Mplayer as it was what google pointed me to and it had a nice little rpm for simple installation. that was under Gnome, when i moved to debian-sarge with the 2.4-x-speakup kernel and running KDE i started having massive conflicts between KDE and Mplayer. i am talking Mplayer would littlerally removed 100+ libs that KDE required to run kind of problems. i soon was pointed to kaffeine and xine. i love kaffeine for its simplicity and so much so even my wife, very computer illiterate, can use it with next to zero problems.

i have not used Mplayer and will not until i can figure out how to make it play nice with my vs of debian and KDE. once i can do that I might consider adding it to my systems again, but then right now i have no reason as kaffeine works great, and xine does just as good.

Its not a problem if you compile it yourself. If its packaged by a distro this can cause dependency problems.

With all the codecs installed, I find mplayer to be easy to use and pretty much effortless. It plugs in to mozilla via plugger, and I wind up with a media player that...well...it just works. I even use it in preference to xmms when streaming audio using streamtuner.

I also use Xine, totem, and ogle for some things some times, but generally I just go with mplayer because there are unlikely to be any issues and it will just work.

Under Gentoo how would you classify it? Did I compile it myself or was it packaged by the distro?

By the way I used kmplayer because it is a KDE front end to mplayer and is quite integrated into KDE. On the other hand I use XMMS for audio.

Either way it works fine.

Well, I should have been a bit more specific.