Unfortunately, MPlayer is mainly for Linux systems, Windows port lacks the graphical user interface. Operating a media player from command line is not so good, so I wrote a frontend (inspired by Smerli) to ease your job!
The only thing you should do is to download the latest version, install it and use it! You don't have to install ANY codecs, as this player already contains almost everything.
Features of MPlayer Frontend (MPF) 1.0 :
• Here are some features of the MPF frontend I wrote:
- You can drag&drop files onto the window
- Accepts commandline filename, so can be associated with movie files
- Playlist with subtitles
- Shutdown system after play
- Normalize volume, extra stereo
- Brightness, contrast, etc. control
- Can open subtitles even from a ZIP file
- Subtitle font and size can be adjusted
- PanScan emulation, Expand mode (make subtitles and osd appear on the black stripes under/above film)
...and more
• And some features of MPlayer itself:
- Can play almost every media file!
- No codec needed!
- Very fast playing (on my 850Mhz celeron consumes about 20-30% CPU avarage)
- Great picture quality
- INSTANT SEEKING
...and much more... take a look at mplayer
homepage.
What codecs should i install?
MPlayer does not need any codec. Indeed it will not use any codecs installed. However it can play a great number of formats. If you find that a certain movie is unsupported by mplayer, than you should try downloading the MPlayer codec pack from the homesite.
These codecs are specially for MPlayer, so other movie players won't use them, and of course the system won't be messed up. You have to uncompress the contents of the codec pack archive into the directory
/mplayer/codecs, MPlayer will use it automatically.
Usually recent QuickTime, RealVideo or WMV movies need this option.