MPlayer
MPlayer is an open source, free software media player for Linux, Unix-like, Windows, Mac OS X and other operating systems that can currently play back more video and audio formats than any other media player. Among them are CDs, DVDs and Video CDs, multimedia container formats like AVI, ASF, MOV, RealMedia, Ogg and Matroska, video codecs like DivX, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Sorenson, WMV, RealVideo and audio codecs like MP3, Vorbis, RealAudio and WMA.
MPlayer supports a variety of different output devices to display video like X11, Quartz, DirectX, VESA, SDL and fancy ones like ASCII art and Blinkenlights.
Its companion is MEncoder, the Movie Encoder.
Most video and audio codecs are supported natively through the libavcodec library of the FFmpeg project. Some proprietary codecs need binary DLL files, using a DLL loader forked from the WINE project.
MPlayer is distributed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.
MPlayer was originally written by Arpad Gereöffy, but soon many others joined the development. In the beginning most developers were from Hungary, but nowadays the developers come from all over the world. MPlayer is now maintained by Alex Beregszászi.
MPlayer used to be called "MPlayer - The Movie Player for Linux", but now that it supports many operating systems besides Linux this was shortened to "MPlayer - The Movie Player".
See also
