There are two ways to get TrueType fonts to work. The first is to pass the -font option to specify a TrueType font file on the command line. This option will be a good candidate to put in your configuration file (see the manual page for details). The second is to create a symlink called subfont.ttf to the font file of your choice. Either

ln -s /path/to/sample_font.ttf ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf

for each user individually or a system-wide one:

ln -s /path/to/sample_font.ttf $PREFIX/share/mplayer/subfont.ttf

If MPlayer was compiled with fontconfig support, the above methods won't work, instead -font expects a fontconfig font name and defaults to the sans-serif font. Example:

mplayer -font 'Bitstream Vera Sans' anime.mkv

To get a list of fonts known to fontconfig, use fc-list.

If for some reason you wish or need to employ bitmap fonts, download a set from our homepage. You can choose between various ISO fonts and some sets of fonts contributed by users in various encodings.

Uncompress the file you downloaded to ~/.mplayer or $PREFIX/share/mplayer. Then rename or symlink one of the extracted directories to font, for example:

ln -s ~/.mplayer/arial-24 ~/.mplayer/font

ln -s $PREFIX/share/mplayer/arial-24 $PREFIX/share/mplayer/font

Fonts should have an appropriate font.desc file which maps Unicode font positions to the actual code page of the subtitle text. Another solution is to have UTF-8-encoded subtitles and use the -utf8 option or give the subtitles file the same name as your video file with a .utf extension and have it in the same directory as the video file.

MPlayer has a completely user-definable OSD Menu interface.