GNOME Mplayer For Linux

GNOME MPlayer is an open source application designed from the ground up to act as an easy-to-use and minimalistic GUI (Graphical User Interface) front-end for the well known MPlayer command-line software.

The application supports Stereo, Surround and 5.1/7.1 Surround audio output, OSD, post-processing, AC3/DTS pass-through to S/PDIF, AAS (Advanced Substation Alpha) subtitles, embedded fonts, subtitle font scaling and encoding, keyboard shortcuts, MPlayer settings, plugin emulation, and language settings for audio and subtitle streams.

It can be used to play any audio or video file that MPlayer supports, including Audio-CDs, DVD-Video discs, VCDs, and Internet streams. It supports MKV and DVD chapters, video subtitles, album art retrieval from Amazon.com, and much more.

At a first glance, the application looks like a very basic program that can only play files and nothing more. But don’t be fooled by its minimal interface, as it provides users with a great set of options, accessible from the Edit menu.

While the video output can be set to OpenGL, X11, XV, XVMC, VAAPI or VDPAU drivers, the audio output supports ALSA, PulseAudio, ARTS, ESD, JACK and OSS sound servers. Users will be able to set hardware acceleration or CrystalHD hardware support.

Under the hood, we can report that the application is written in the C programming language and the GTK+ toolkit, making it compatible with the GNOME desktop environment. However, it does not depend on the GNOME runtime libraries, but only on GTK+, GLib and D-Bus.

Overall, GNOME MPlayer is a great interface for the powerful MPlayer multimedia playback program. In the front it offers a very minimal GUI, but in the back it provides users with a wide range of features. We really wish that future versions of the application will have audio and video equalizers!