mplayer2 Project

Differences from MPlayer to mplayer2

Improvements over MPlayer

Better pause handling

In MPlayer executing any commands forced the player to unpause. This is no longer the case; in MPlayer2 you can change settings, seek, or run other commands while paused.

Better Matroska support

MPlayer2 has improved support for Matroska files, including support for ordered chapters and editions.

Easy to use multithreading support

It's easy to build MPlayer2 with FFmpeg-mt support, and threading will be used automatically without requiring any manual configuration. This gives a big performance increase on multicore machines.

Much better support for VDPAU functionality on NVIDIA cards

Removed limitations that prevented switching frames more than once per monitor refresh. With MPlayer2 you can play high-FPS content or use fast forward on a 60 Hz monitor without breaking playback.
Added support for the frame timing functionality of VDPAU.
Improved performance by better buffer handling and smarter subtitle texture uploads (both VDPAU hardware decoding and displaying software decoded video with VDPAU perform better).
Added logic to reduce frame timing jitter in some situations.
Handle frames added by deinterlacing properly.
Several bugfixes.
Various minor improvements (studio level output support, set default deinterlace mode, ...)

Support for precise seeks

It's now possible to seek to any frame in the video; seeks are no longer necessarily limited to keyframes.

Support for gettext-based translations

The message translation support in MPlayer was basically useless for binary Linux distributions, as the message language was hardcoded at compile time and supporting several languages would have required a separate program binary for every one. Runtime-switchable translations with gettext are now supported.

No longer depends on embedded FFmpeg tree or internal FFmpeg symbols

MPlayer required an embedded copy of FFmpeg to compile. This caused a maintenance burden as changes in FFmpeg fairly often broke the compilation of MPlayer. While it could link against shared FFmpeg libraries it would still use some code from the embedded tree instead, and also depended on internal FFmpeg symbols that are not part of the public API, thus making any dynamic-linked binaries liable to break when FFmpeg libraries are updated. MPlayer2 does not depend on embedded FFmpeg library copies and uses FFmpeg only through its public API. This eases maintenance and makes dynamic-linked binaries safe.

Miscellaneous

Lots of bugfixes
Improvements in audio/video sync handling
Cleaned up and improved various terminal output messages
Support for gapless playback of audio files (option -gapless-audio)
Better responsiveness in certain cases where MPlayer had significant latency before reading or completing commands
Support modifier keys in command bindinds (currently X11-based input only)
Keep fullscreen state by default when switching between files
OSS4 volume control
Various stuff not listed here...

Dropped features

MEncoder is no longer available

The MEncoder codebase was thoroughly rotten and has been deleted. A different solution to provide some encoding functionality will be added in a future version.

Internal GUI has been removed

The bad internal GUI (gmplayer) has been deleted. Future work will concentrate on improving the interface for external GUI implementations instead.

Some embedded library copies have been removed

FFmpeg libraries - already explained above; mostly no negative effects but some video filters which depended on internal FFmpeg code are not available (vf_fspp, vf_mcdeint, vf_qp, vf_spp).
libmpeg2 - libmpeg2 support has been dropped completely. The libavcodec mpeg2 decoder should work for all normal uses.
vidix - support for VIDIX video drivers has been dropped (it had little maintenance and didn't work with any modern graphics card).
tremor - embedded tremor library is no longer included.
libdvdnav, libdvdread and libdvdcss - these libraries are no longer included with the player. However in-tree compilation is still supported too if you add them in the player directory manually.

Other differences that may surprise people used to MPlayer 1

Subtitle rendering uses libass by default

Using libass to render subtitles gives better font rendering and styling support, but on the other hand some subtitle options may not work as before or at all. The video filter needed to draw libass subtitles with video output drivers that do not directly support rendering them may also cause problems in some rare cases (videos with unusual colorspaces). If you encounter problems you can use the "-noass" option to use the old subtitle rendering functionality.

libavformat demuxers are used for more file formats

libavformat demuxers are now the default for some file formats that used internal demuxer versions by default in MPlayer (most notably AVI). This can cause some behavior differences as the demuxers have slightly different feature sets - sometimes better, but sometimes also worse.

The -fixed-vo option is enabled by default

This leads to some behavior differences when playing multiple files.