How to Install Gnome Mplayer in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

As I've said before, if you want the ultimate multimedia player for GNU/Linux, then there aren't that many which are capable of competing against MPLayer. But the apparent problem is that, if you have no intentions of learning GNU/Linux commands a little bit ;-), then playing multimedia files with all those excellent features of MPLayer ain't gonna be that easy.

In that case our only hope is to find a GUI that uses the MPLayer as the " multimedia engine". Although I've written about few in the past such as SMPlayer (one of the best), UMPlayer (not bad at all) and Gnome media player are just a few to name.

But there is a GTK+ written GUI called Gnome MPlayer, which is developed by a serious dude :D who really seems to get what the users want. I mean, seriously, Totem, the default player that comes with Gnome desktop.. it ain't bad... but can it let you adjust the subtitle delay?, audio/video delays?, gain audio?... seriously, other than "just play" which is its philosophy, it's pretty much useless, unless you're living in a error-free, perfect world where audio/video files have no errors, etc :/.

Anyhow, once installed Gnome MPlayer you'll be able to do things like...

*. Adjust subtitle delays, change font, change colours, font scaling, add drop shadows, etc.

*. Gain audio.

Amazingly simple but...

*. Playlist (GUI).

*. Add post processing effects which can enhance videos (especially if they have low bitrates - low quality ones by default, etc).

Right there!, that's twice the "Totem" :D...

*. Add/remove displays information on screen such as playback time/ remaining time, etc.

*. Directly open DVD/CD/VCD/ISO images or a copied DVD in your HDD.

*. Play your TV Card (if you have one) directly from the GUI.

*. Take screenshots.

The "tempting" options window for the computer Geeks!...

*. Change video and audio output.

*. Display live audio/video details (bitrate, frame rate, resolution, codec type, etc).

*. Adjust video brightness/hue/Saturation. 

*. Enable video cache. 

*. Enable/disable multiple instance of the player (you know running more than one window simultaneously).

*. Load external audio file... and a lot more when you enter the preference window.

As you can see, this MPlayer front-end does enable almost all the useful features of the command line based MPLayer multimedia engine. If you're new to this (I am :D) and after reading these "features" you might be thinking "okay, this is another *too many options = confusing GUI* type application".

NO, as you can see from the screenshots, the developer has done an extremely smart thing by making the default GUI so easy to use because it's so simple yet if you're a power user and need additional controlability over the player, then the "preference" window is just for you. So, the player is aimed at both newbies ;-) and the expert users, which is something that is very rare in applications these days. 

Anyway, you can install Gnome MPlayer in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal by entering the below command in your GNU/Linux terminal window.

sudo apt-get install gnome-mplayer

My only complaint was that, in few occasions the video screen seemed a bit sluggish (few dropped frames, etc) but I don't think the application have anything to do with it (hopefully) since my old Ati GPU is fighting with Compiz really hard to keep up at the moment. But luckily I changed the "video output" from the preference window and everything works really fine, at least for me :D.

So as an ending note, if you want a very powerful GUI that enables a lot of features of the excellent MPLayer, then I highly recommend the Gnome Mplayer, oh it's something special :D.

Read More

How to Install Dragon Player (Written in Qt) in Ubuntu 11.04 , 10.10 and 10.04?

Although it's said that Linus Torvalds was a big fan of KDE and used to hate Gnome for its simplicity... yet with the KDE version 4, where the desktop got a total different look-n-feel + drifted towards simplicity (still not as notorious as Gnome), now Linux hates KDE for that!.

Although he says KDE is too simple yet being a Gnome me self :P... I still find KDE4 to be quite elegant and full of useful features. Anyhow all I'm trying to say is that, you hardly see an application which is pretty simple with Qt or from KDE developers in general.

No matter what they design... you'll get a lot of options to play with. It's apparent with players such as VLC (written in Qt), UMPlayer, or anything that has the KDE touch.

Yet if you were looking for a simple and fast multimedia player which uses the KDE's own multimedia framework called Phonon... then Dragon Player is the one to go for.

Main features...

*. Anything Phonon plays... the Dragon can play :) - MP3, MP4, OGM, MKV... anything goes.

*. Resuming capability (starts the videos from the last position you exit the player).

*. Automatic subtitle loading.

*. Change screen brightness/hue/contrast.

*. CD/DVD playback support.

*. Speed - Yes, this is one of the things you'll get with an application that is simple. It loads fast and known to take, somewhat less system resources in comparison with others.

Anyway, you can install Dragon Player in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal or 10.10 and 10.04 by entering the below command.

sudo apt-get install dragonplayer

Remember, unless you're using Kubuntu  or KDE desktop, this will require some decent amount of file size downloading (about 64MB). Although this has nothing to do with the player, it's just that, since it's KDE based and you're using Gnome, there has to be some KDE bindings installed first. That' all I've gotta say about it :). Enjoy. 

Read More

How To Install VLC 1.1.10 in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

VLC or VideoLAN is one of the most popular cross-platform media players without a doubt. To be honest, personally I actually don't like it that much. It's written in Qt and comes with the ability to play almost all the audio/video codecs and even has an encoding capability as with MPlayer, still I don't find it that robust like most others.

But when it comes to ease of use and lots of built in features (unlike with the default MPlayer command-line version), well you gotta give some credit to the VLC developers nonetheless. Anyway few days ago they released another version which makes it now the 1.1.10.


Few main features...

*. Play huge list of audio/video codecs (including container formats) - mp3, aac, wma, wmv, flac, mp4, avi, mkv, h.264, xvid, divx... seriously it's BIG.

*. Add advanced audio and video filters using graphical tools.

*. Equalizer.

*. Playlist support. 

*. Change brightness/hue/...

*. Screen capture.

*. Stream video/audios.

*. Encode into different formats.

*. Subtitle font size, color, etc changing.

Although from the beginning VLC was written using the Qt toolkit and these never versions come with the Qt-4 and look pretty cool too :).

You can easily install VLC 1.1.10 in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal by using the below PPA, this might not work on other Ubuntu (10.10 or 10.04) versions. According to Unixmen team, this will also work in LinuxMint 11 as well.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:unixmen-com/vlc

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install vlc mozilla-plugin-vlc vlc-plugin-pulse

Read More

How to Install SMPlayer in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

The usual readers of this blog know how much I love MPLayer (oh man, not again :P). It is one of the most advanced multimedia players that you can find. And all of those features are totally free at no cost whatsoever. But the apparent problem with it is the lack of a "decent" GUI.

For instance after installing the main engine (which is a command-line one) and if you use the "man mplayer" command for accessing the official manual then you'll be amazed by the options/features that it comes with.

But as said, the difficulty lies while "accessing" those features. Unless you're gonna love entering command by command whenever you want to play something ... it can be bloody exhausting. And as a result many other developers all around the world has come up with their own GUI/"skins" for the MPLayer Engine.

The UMPlayer is a bit new but the rest assured it is one of the most promising as well. The Gnome media player is another frond-end written using the GTK+ toolkit. But being "close" to Gnome, it won't give you a lot of features nonetheless.

In that case and as always the Qt geeks have come up with their own GUI written for it which is called SMPlayer and I gotta tell ya, it is pretty darn impressive folks!. From changing the theme to customizing advanced options such as...

*. Change Audio/Video syncing (delays, etc) errors.

*. Switch between different video drivers.

*. Gain audio and apply certain effects (both audio and video) to enhance the overall video quality.

*. Powerful Equalizer.

*. Change brightness/hue, etc.

*. Easy to use buttons (pause/play/stop, etc).

*. Resume capability (so it would start a video/audio files from the last position that you stopped it - can be disabled).

*. Change playback speed.

*. Excellent sensitivity (you know it pauses when you press the "pause button" without any noticeable delays - on most cases, etc).

*. Setup to search for subtitle files automatically from sources such as opensubtitles.org.

*. Since it uses the MPLayer engine, it plays all the multimedia codecs such as - mp3, ogg vorbis, WMA, WMV, AAC, MP4, H.264, H.263, avi, OGM, MKV... the list goes on.

*. Translation capability... are just a very few to mention.

If you use Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal or 10.10, 10.04 then you can install SMPlayer pretty easily by entering the below command in your Terminal.

sudo apt-get install smplayer

This will also install a theme pack as well. Enjoy!.

Read More

How To Install MPlayer in Fedora Core 15?

MPlayer is one  of the best multimedia players ever written for GNU/Linux (yep it's also available for MS windows and Mac OSX, etc). The most powerful part of MPlayer is actually the command line version which you can start by entering "mplayer" in your Terminal once installed.

There is actually nothing that you cannot do with MPlayer. Do you want to correct audio/video syncing issues? or subtitle loading issues?, adding several effects to enhance both audio and video files, etc... it is pretty darn amazing.

But the sad thing is that since it's a command-line based one... almost all of those are hidden in the official GUI version, which is basically a small representation of the what the actual/underline command-line "engine" is capable of.

Anyhow, after installing Fedora Core 15 (with the Gnome3 desktop, hurray!, or maybe not :/ ) you can use the easylife app, which is basically a graphical front-end for installing almost any proprietary under FC... but if you want the old school approach of starting your Terminal and entering command, well lets do it in your way then :).

If you haven't done already, then lets first enable the RPMFusion repository which gives you a lot of the proprietary software pre-builds for Fedora Core. To do that, open your Terminal and enter the below command.

su -c 'yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'

Now let's use "yum" and install MPlayer (including the GUI) in Fedora Core 15.

yum install mplayer-gui

That's should do it, enjoy!. 

Read More

UMPlayer 0.9.5 is Released (Qt written, Media Player Front-End)

If you haven't heard about UMPlayer, then it is a graphical front-end which uses the MPLayer as the multimedia engine for playing audio/videos in a GNU/Linux environment. It's kind of a new "project" and the earlier version did have few issues but the rest assured, when considering how the GUI is organized and its "beauty", UMPlayer will be something especial without a doubt.

The great thing about it is, not only on GNU/Linux PC/Laptops... it can also be run in MS Windows, Mac OSX as well. And as mentioned above, the most "important" feature behind its popularity may well be because of the gorgeous look-n-feel it inherits... which can be foreseen :P since they've used Qt toolkit to build the GUI.

Main features...

*. According to the developers themselves, it supports 270 different types video/audio file/containers! such as... AAC, AC3, ASF, AVI, DIVX, FLV, H.263, Matroska, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, OGG, QT, RealMedia, VOB, Vorbis, WAV, WMA, WMV, XVID, etc.

*. Can play both encrypted/unencrypted DVDs as well.

*. Fully featured equalizer.

*. Adjust screen hue/brightness, etc.

*. Audio gain.

*. Take screenshots.

*. Adjust audio/video delays (very handy sometimes, for instance while watching a movie - if you hear the gun shot sound before the video and wondering how to fix it ....).

*. Lots of audio/video filters.

*. Easily change skins.

*. Online subtitle search... are just a few to mention.

How can I install it in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

Not just for Ubuntu, but you can obtain builds for Debian, RPM based packages, MS Windows, etc from this UMPlayer download page. Once the downloading is complete, just double click on the file and follow the instructions on your screen. That's it!.

Read More

Install VLC Media Player in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal!

Well, I don't think anyone would want an introduction to VLC media player. Although I'd still prefer MPLayer or SMPlayer back-end yet VLC is one of the most popular + fully featured multimedia players that is widely in use nonetheless. One good thing about it is that, once installed, VLC plays almost all the codecs known to mankind :P and lets you do things such as ...

*. Enhance video and audios with various filters.

*. Add/Change brightness/hue... easily.

*. Powerful built-in Equalizer.

*. Heck... it even has the ability to encode videos/audios as well.

*. Web casting support.

*. Play online video channels.

*. Build albums and manage playlists easily... are just a very few of its main features to name.

So, let's cut the cra* and let me humble tell you how to install VLC player in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. Now there are two ways that you can do this. First is using the "Software Center" which lets you do this graphically. In that case, from the top left corner, in the search box on the panel, just enter the following name - "ubuntu software center".

After the software center is open, just search for "vlc" and simply follow the instructions on the screen.

But if that looks like a bit of a work :P, then you can easily install VLC in Ubuntu by issuing the below command in your Terminal.

sudo apt-get install vlc vlc-plugin-pulse mozilla-plugin-vlc

That's it. Enjoy!. 

Read More