Linux Multimedia Hacks

Advanced MPlayer Tweaks

There are a number of advanced tweaks you can use to get the most out of MPlayer. You can even store many of these tweaks to the MPlayer configuration file and save yourself from tons of command-line arguments.

[Hack #48] touched on the basics of multimedia playback using MPlayer, but one look at the MPlayer manpage tells you that MPlayer is much more than that. If you are new to MPlayer, wading through all of these options might leave you a bit cross-eyed, so in this hack I will point out some of the more commonly used advanced options and show you how to set up the MPlayer config file to save many of them.

MPlayer Config File

In this hack, I cover a number of different command-line arguments that you can use to tweak MPlayer. Basically, all of these options can also be set in the MPlayer config file. By default, MPlayer has a global config file in /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf, and a local config file for each user in ~/.mplayer/config that overrides the global config. The format of this config file is pretty simple—take an mplayer command-line argument, remove the leading -, and set it equal to its setting with the = symbol.

For instance, if you read through the different display options you can set in MPlayer with the -vo option in [Hack #47] , you might want to change the default video output option for MPlayer permanently. If you want to set the default -vo option to xv, edit ~/.mplayer/config and add the line (or edit the line if it already exists):

 vo ...