MPlayer is a movie player for Linux (runs on many other Unices, and non-x86 CPUs). It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, PVA, Matroska files, supported by many native, XAnim, RealPlayer, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch Video CD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, RealMedia, Sorenson, Theora, and MPEG-4 (DivX) movies, too. MPlayer supports a wide range of output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, libcaca, DirectFB, GGI and SDL (and this way all their drivers) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and Radeon, Mach64, Permedia3). MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the DVB and DXR3/Hollywood+ and antialiased shaded subtitles (14 supported types) with European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic, Korean fonts, and the onscreen display (OSD).

The player is rock solid playing damaged MPEG files (useful for some VCDs), and it plays bad AVI files which are unplayable with the famous Windows Media Player. Even AVI files without index chunk are playable, and you can temporarily rebuild their indexes with the -idx option, or permanently with MEncoder, thus enabling seeking! As you see, stability and quality are the most important things, but the speed is also amazing. There is also a powerful filter system for video and audio manipulation.

MEncoder (MPlayer's Movie Encoder) is a simple movie encoder, designed to encode MPlayer-playable movies AVI/ASF/OGG/DVD/VCD/VOB/MPG/MOV/VIV/FLI/RM/NUV/NET/PVA to other MPlayer-playable formats (see below). It can encode with various codecs, like MPEG-4 (DivX4) (one or two passes), libavcodec, PCM/MP3/VBR MP3 audio.

• (S)VCD (Super Video CD)
• CDRwin's .bin image file
• DVD, including encrypted DVD
• MPEG-1/2 (ES/PS/PES/VOB)
• RIFF AVI file format
• ASF/WMV/WMA format
• QT/MOV/MP4 format
• RealAudio/RealVideo format
• Ogg/OGM files
• Matroska
• NUT
• NSV (Nullsoft Streaming Video)
• VIVO format
• FLI format
• NuppelVideo format
• yuv4mpeg format
• FILM (.cpk) format
• RoQ format
• PVA format
• Streaming via HTTP/FTP, RTP/RTSP, MMS/MMST, MPST, SDP
• TV grabbing