Comments on: MPlayer and Openbox

By: vev

vev — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:27:59 +0000

Very nice!I also use Openbox+Mplayer, though i use smplayer frontend. Cheers

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:47:17 +0000

dave foster: Ah, you’re right: I forgot that those values could change slightly from distro to distro, thanks.

robert: Sorry, but I’m afraid you’ll never sell me on VLC. I have friends who love it, but it doesn’t seem to do what I want, how I want. To each his own, I guess. …

reacocard: Thanks for those, I have been wanting to set some of those things up properly in the config file. To be completely honest, I hadn’t dug around for them yet because the documentation for MPlayer is … intimidating. Cheers!

By: reacocard

reacocard — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:18:54 +0000

For the xscreensaver bit, you can always just put

stop-xscreensaver=”yes”

into ~/.mplayer/config instead. This works for any mplayer command line argument (i think), so you can preset mplayer pretty much however you want with it.

And yes, VLC subtitling sucks. Mplayer’s is good bvy default, but to make it even better add these line to ~/.mplayer/config

subfont-osd-scale=3
subfont-text-scale=3
embeddedfonts=yes
spuaa=4
spugauss=3.0
subfont-blur=4
ffactor=1

The first two lines set the text size to a more reasonable level. The remainder increase the quality of font rendering, giving you beautifully smooth subtitles.

Other tricks you can try are

Set default audio/sub language:

alang=jn,jpn,en,eng
slang=en,eng

Those lines choose japanese audio if available (useful for watching anime ), and fall back to english if it isnt (or the default in the file if neither). Subs will be automatically enabled if english subs are available, otherwise they are disabled.

Up software volume max for computers with poor speakers (use 9 and 0 keys to adjust softvol):

softvol=yes
softvol-max=400

By: Sujoy

Sujoy — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:34:46 +0000

nah, subtitle rendering in VLC puts me off, and mplayer with all its keybindings and a simple config file rocks.

By: robert

robert — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:11:22 +0000

Wow, so much work for such simple things. In VLC I can do this with mouse clicks under the ‘view’ menu. VLC, in all operating systems, is the best!

By: dave foster

dave foster — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:57:02 +0000

Thanks – I had always wanted to set that up but never bothered to do so. Just a note, on my system, the name is “x11″ and not “xv”. I got that by xprop | grep CLASS on the mplayer window, perhaps I got lucky.. the name/class thing is always confusing.