On 01:58:13 Nov 15, Jacob Meuser wrote: > > command line media player. sorry, but that doesn't make sense, IMO. > I mean, if you're playing a video, you have a video window .. it's > graphical by nature. >
Didn't you check out the menu option in my article? mplayer has a sexy OSD. :) Well any reasonable UNIX app should have an extensive set of command line controls and tweaks. Doesn't matter if it is multimedia. Even some web apps have the same parameters configured from the command line. > > that's pretty basic functionality of a media player, no? > I agree. > > $ vlc --help | wc -l > VLC media player 0.8.6c Janus > 169 > $ mplayer --help | wc -l > 39 > $ > This is not apples to apples comparison. mplayer can play any media. In fact you don't need any other application. You can also stream with mplayer in an indirect way. It can play SIP urls and play Internet streams. You cannot run a media server. For that you can use darkice,liveice,shout* or even ffserver. Of course I tried vlc for this very purpose but I am sorry to say I was disappointed. The documentation asks me to use the GUI. I don't like that. I am sure you know this but still. mplayer can play a) audio b) video c) streams d) analog television e) digital television Now what remains? :) Have you checked the filters and plugins? It is mind boggling. And the tweakability with the input keys and commands? $ mplayer -input keylist $ mplayer -input cmdlist LIRC is pretty basic these days but mplayer is quite tweakable to one's taste and as a media player for UNIX this is what one would expect. > > yes, in -current the vlc port can be built with aRTs and Esound > support, and it does use wxWidgets for the GUI. however, it does > have a curses UI: vlc -I curses. > But where is the documentation? Anyway I might be biased here. I don't like the smell of vlc. That is all. > rtp stream server. sound server output (in -current). playing > mpeg movies in firefox. mplayer plugin for firefox. Have you checked that out? I got that working for OpenBSD but for some reason it does not play sound most of the time. I hope some port of it is in the works... (maybe it is already there) > > yes. it's a mess. how can e.g, mpg321 know that file.m3u is a playlist, > but mplayer needs to have -playlist specified? and if -playlist is > not specified, it complains about missing win32-codecs??? > Buddy, You are seriously mistaken here. The -playlist option cannot be avoided because mplayer expects a media file as input. You can get the best of both worlds with the -playlist option. Check out my article. You can invoke the input subsystem from a FIFO file. Really cool. :) But tvtime can do that too. > > actually, the more I use it, the less I like it. > I have nothing to say here. ;) > > I see a statements like: > > It is a mature application that has no parallel. MEncoder, it companion > video encoder program, does a much better job than FFMPEG in transcoding > video, although it is a bit difficult to use and learn. > > that have no basis. Why? > how and why MEncoder "does a much better job than > FFMPEG in transcoding video"? there is no comparison whatsoever > between ffmpeg transcoding and mplayer transcoding. further, mplayer/ > mencoder are heavy users of libavcodec/libavformat (FFMpeg libraries). > that's what all those 'lavc*' options are. ffmpeg screws up the videos. Did you know that? I have burnt my finger several times with it. There are plenty of bugs and there is hardly any tweakability there. It is very easy to goof up when you cut videos. It somehow does not get the mpeg keyframes and their integrity correctly. And it crashes and cannot handle audio resampling. It works sometimes but mostly I have to resort to some external application for it. mencoder is harder to use, but it is far more stable, feature rich and does what you expect. However this is not to say that mencoder can do everything that ffmpeg can do. I have heard that ffmpeg can record X11 events but I never got it to work. mencoder cannot. I am sure there are few corner cases where ffmpeg can do a better job but I don't remember right now. Nothing to beat ffmpeg in ease of use though. > > $ ffmpeg -i input.avi -target ntsc-dvd dvd.mpg > > takes any AVI input and outputs a DVD compliant NTSC mpeg2 PS. what > is the mplayer equivilent? Check out the html documentation. It is far more readable than the man pages. Just to make my point I am yanking the relevant command line. $ mencoder -oac lavc -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd -vf scale=720:480,\ harddup -srate 48000 -af lavcresample=48000 -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:\ vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=5000:keyint=18:acodec=ac3:\ abitrate=192:aspect=16/9 -ofps 30000/1001 \ -o movie.mpg movie.avi You have examples for everything including what you ask. Just point your browser under OpenBSD to file:///usr/local/share/doc/mplayer/index.html and Enjoy! :) regards, Girish
