[MPlayer-users] Windows binary available yet?

[Lasse Kärkkäinen / Tronic]

>> Good news: There are already several programs freely available
>> for
>> Windows that play media files with the same ease and quality
>> as MPlayer on Linux.
BJM> Same ease and quality?

No, not same, but sometimes better.

BJM> OK, no smiley but I *know* you must be joking.  You could not possibly
BJM> think that that piece of sh*t MS WMP even compares to Mplayer.  It is
BJM> precisely that big bag of elephant turds that I am trying to replace!

Windows Media Player 6.4 + DivXG400 is a lot better than MPlayer (I
actually used it on Linux too, in WINE, until I found MPlayer).

WMP 6.4 can be downloaded from M$'s download-page, but you'll have to
select NT 4.0 as your operating system (or it will offer those new
bloated versions). It will still work on W98 etc. though.

DivXG400 can be found with Google. It works with any card, doesn't
need to be G400. It displays subtitles, changes framerates on fly and
other nice stuff.

BJM> I won't even touch the "quality" comparison that you draw between

The quality with WMP is, in theory, equal to MPlayer (same codecs are
used), but thanks to hardware scaling etc. it can be better.

BJM> a) seek back and forward 10 minute, 1 minute and 10 second intervals
BJM>    with the press of a key instead of using a stupid slider?

Yes, if you have working codec. This apparently doesn't include DivX.
Anyway, I'm happy with the slider when I need to seek 10 minutes or
something. For very short seeks it is bad, but DivX/AVI doesn't handle
seeks too well anyway (slow as hell). Next/previous frame/keyfram seeking
would be nice, but for that I can use VirtualDub.

BJM> b) adjust a/v sync?

No need for that - it works out of the box. If it doesn't, delete or
VirtualDub might fix the broken file.

BJM> d) play (CVS version of) mp1e files without having pauses every few
BJM>    seconds so that it can re-sync the audio and video?

Here MPlayer either loses sync or (with -framedrop) drops loads of
frames while syncing. On the same box, W98 and WMP 6.4, same video
plays nicely without framedrops. Movies with bigger resolutions might
skip sometimes for sync, but there is no difference to MPlayer there.

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Lasse Kärkkäinen aka Tronic      http://snull.cjb.net
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