Copied from: http://vivapinkfloyd.blogspot.com/2008/06/...t-powerful.html

SMPlayer Review - One of the Most Powerful Video Players for Linux

SMPlayer is a complete video player built in Qt 4.4.0 and based on the powerful, open-source MPlayer.

The version I decided to test in this review is 0.6.1 from SVN. SMPlayer basically plays anything video or audio, including DVDs, VCDs or DVD ISO images, audio CDs, MPEG, AVI or ASF. You can also play mounted images of DVDs by pointing to the directory which contains the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories. It can also play videos from a given URL location.

One of the great features SMPlayer has is the ability to resume a movie after you closed it and restarted the application. This really is useful and time-saving in case of a reboot, logout or a restart of the X server, or just in case you will need to close it in order to free up memory and CPU for some other task.

Among the other features it comes with are OSD (On-Screen Display), very detailed information about the currently playing movie, support for subtitles (which, by the way, are displayed very nice and clean and allow font resizing to anything it fits you better), support for DVD chapters, and a whole bunch of video effects, like rotating or filters. You will have to select the default CD/DVD drives in the Options -> Preferences window.

SMPlayer is highly configurable, allowing to change the icon theme, the language (it has full support for many languages, see the screenshot below) and many more. You can select the output video driver too. I liked the support for configuring the interface: besides the language or icon theme, you can also change the style or the default font the application uses. This allows you to make SMPlayer look just the way you want it to.

Subtitle support is also powerful: SMPlayer allows any subtitle sizes, it provides the possibility to automatically load subtitles which match a specific criteria, the position of subtitles on screen and the language encoding to use.

finally a mplayer frontend for kde4? dragon player being nice and all, seems too basic and dont have the options i m used to in mplayer. + i prefer mplayer to xine

wat i concern is can it handle d variety of media type around..i need a player which can support H264, RMVB, FLV n all..
just like media player classic!

This post has been edited by ben_ang: Aug 16 2008, 11:44 AM

Those codecs are already installed by default if you installed Linux Mint. If you're on openSUSE you can get it from the Packman repo.

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Added on August 16, 2008, 12:07 pmI tested playing .flv file, yes it can play.

This post has been edited by ayob99: Aug 16 2008, 12:07 PM

hmm any screenie/ interface?

Here's one playing DVD, Robert Cray in Montreux 2005

ah, nv really try linux mint, but when it comes 2 media playing, guess linux mint is d most ready OS, already installed wat u need.. BTW, where 2 find all those codecs anyway?

Know why most major distro reluctant to include some of the codecs?
Most of them are patented and it violates licensing.
Hallo Bill Gates .... go kick Mint's developer butt!!
hehehe.

If you are using openSUSE, add Packman to your YAST repositories http://packman.links2linux.de/, Ubuntu/Mint users can download from the Medibuntu repositories using Apt. I'm not sure of other distros though, you'll probably find it if you googled hard enough or go to the Linux forums.

ahh ic, not bad i think
if i use the osx driver(GFx) in linux, possible ka?



u should give a try, but really
opensuse also has an easy repository update

Hmm.... This player not bad.
But im wondering why the sound not match with their mouth one.
It seem like the sound is run faster than the video. Weird....

i thought d main thngy abt linux is open source? y u wanna pay if somethngy u can get it 4 free?

great player...now playing ,mov .avi with proper color setting...thanks bro

Glad to be of help....

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Added on August 18, 2008, 10:13 am
Open source doesn't mean free as in free lunch, it means free for others to modify the source code. Read this from opensource.org:



Read more of it here> http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd

This post has been edited by ayob99: Aug 18 2008, 10:13 AM

Just install and it failed to play .mkv?
Is there anyone also facing the same problem?
Thanks.

This post has been edited by xphr3ak: Aug 18 2008, 08:16 PM

You don't get it aren't you?
I give an example, to play wmv format you need microsoft's codec for that format.
That's what people been talking about w32codecs. This codecs is not opensource. Go figure yourself to whom the license belongs to.
Some says illegal to distribute....some says, who cares...
That is why major Distro does not include it in their package. You need to get it from thirdparty repositories.



Don't blame on the front end. It just a gui. Backend is still mplayer.
You must have missing codec needed to play matroska file.
I suggest you install ffmpeg, lots of multimedia format supported by this encoder.

Which distro are you using?

If openSUSE add Packman to your repositories list, if Ubuntu use Apt to search for the matroska codecs.

Hi, i am new user of Linux. Just got my Acer Aspire One with Linux lite installed.
Can this player play RMVB file ??

Yes if you have the codecs installed. MPlayer (which the SMPlayer is using) uses the GStreamer plug-in to decode 90+ audio/video codecs.

Hi guys,

For Ubuntu users, you only need one package : ubuntu-restricted-extras.

Install this through the Synaptic Packet Manager. This package will install all the codes you need, java, flash, and rar support.

It is the 'magic' package.