A new version of MPlayer was released just the other day. Lots of big changes in this one. As usual MPlayer continues to make real strides. Very cool stuff.
Here’s some highlights from the changelog:
- IVTV hardware MPEG audio/video decoder output
- audio stream switching in MPEG-TS/PS, Matroska and streams supported by libavformat
- chapter seeking in Matroska files
- PVR input for hardware MPEG encoder based cards, such as Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150/250/350/500 AKA IVTV but also pvrusb2 and cx88 (requires Linux >= 2.6.18 kernel, featuring native V4L2 MPEG API)
- support for seeking to chapters in dvd:// and dvdnav:// streams
- VC-1/WMV3/WMV9 video decoder
- preliminary Vorbis encoder
- support of x264 encoding via libavcodec
- -endpos option for MPlayer
I’m really just picking out the features I’m most interested in. There are quite a lot more, as you can see on the news page.
My favorites of course are that I can watch TV with my Hauppauge PVR-500 (which I’ve written about before), and Matroska chapter support (which I requested). 😀
Most people will be glad to know that this new version plays WMV videos just fine, without relying on win32codecs anymore. That was actually a Google Summer of Code project for ffmpeg, which is responsible for libavcodec.
There’s also an ebuild already in portage, though it is hard-masked right now.