14 DAY TRIAL // Last we heard of the famous Mplayer was all the way back in 2013 and it was only about a minor update. The developers have now returned with a new update, but this time it's a more consistent one.
Mplayer used to be all the rage just a few years ago, but a lot of other players have surfaced since then and the competition became a lot fiercer. For an application to survive, its developers need to make sure that it's up to date, but that hasn't happened with Mplayer.
"Mplayer 1.2 is compatible with the recent FFMpeg 2.8 release. The tarball already includes a copy of FFmpeg, so you don't need to fetch it separately. Due to some big API changes coming to FFmpeg, this release will not work with new FFmpeg master branch, nor with future FFmpeg releases," wrote the developers.
Also, VDPAU hardware accelerated decoding has been enabled for users who have the proper card and drivers, a number of codecs have been improved including HEVC, VP9 and Prores, Opus, AAC, WebP, and JPEG2000, rtsp streaming now uses FFmpeg by default, a number of GUI improvements have been made, and internal copies of libdvdnav and libdvdcss mac are no longer provided.
You can download Mplayer 1.2 from Softpedia or you can wait until it reaches your repository. This is a pretty important package, so it won't take all that long until it arrives.