Mplayer front ends – 407 days old

[Grogan]

I have been using the GUI provided with mplayer ("gmplayer") for years, despite its retardedness. It shows you all the drivers available for mplayer in a dialog, but it's not an interface to select which you want to use or anything useful like that. It uses xv (X11 video) and doesn't even so much as provide a field to pass extra arguments to mplayer, like "-vo gl" or anything like that to choose your method of acceleration.

Sometimes I get a bit of tearing in videos, particularly if I am scaling a high quality video larger. It's just occasional and not that severe, but it bugs my ass that I can't fix it (when I know how). I could just use mplayer in command line mode, but I want a player with controls.

I was watching a movie where the tearing was actually bugging me and I decided it needed fixing now. So despite all that I do like about gmplayer, I sought another. It was a no brainer... I use smplayer on Windows computers and know that it has good configuration dialogs for mplayer, including changing the video output driver. It uses QT4 for the GUI, which I of course have because of KDE. It was too good to be true, "cd into directory and type make". (no configure or anything) so I checked the Makefile, all looked good, nothing to see here, nothing to change and it compiled perfectly, using the compiler flags that QT was built with. I didn't have to touch a thing.

So I did that, and using the "gl" driver (OpenGL) I got rid of my tearing like I knew it would. I just took a shot of a small video, but this is what smplayer looks like for me, in XFCE. Black, because I have QT using my GTK+ style settings.

smplayer.jpg

A pipe threading die on the nose of those who write shitty GUIs

[Bad Haircut]

Same deal with straight QT in KDE (Air with Chrome)

[Bad Haircut]

Have you tried UMplayer, G? I'm sure I read it was a fork of SMplayer. Those black / carbon screenshots they have look really nice.

http://www.umplayer.com/


I got it installed but haven't even opened it yet, keep forgetting.

[Bad Haircut]

These are some of the default skins, dead easy to change. Seems nice, can see why it's popular..

[Bad Haircut]

[Grogan]

I haven't heard of that one, but I'm pretty happy with smplayer. It's back to active again... new 0.8.0 version with very recent changelog entries. It was stagnating for a while, a 0.6.8.

That does seem to be based on smplayer (and it looks pretty good), so hopefully the configuration settings won't be dumbed down. That's my main point... I'm tickled with the control over mplayer that smplayer gives me.