MPlayer for maemo

Overview

A package of MPlayer (a popular video player for linux) for Nokia Internet Tablets. MPlayer currently provides the best quality of mpeg4/divx/xvid video playback for Nokia 770 / N800 and supports many codecs and multimedia file formats. A simple GUI frontend is also included in maemo package, which shows videos found on your memory card in a list and allows to easily select any of them to play.

MPlayer is a selfcontained and nonintrusive package which is easy and safe to install, it does not try to integrate into Nokia 770/N800 gstreamer stack and is highly unlikely to mess up your system.

Features:

Can play converted video with high quality and full framerate (25 or 30 fps)
Can play many low to average resolution mpeg4/divx/xvid videos even without conversion
Can play some video formats, not supported by standard Nokia 770 video player (for example *.flv files from youtube.com)
External subtitles are supported

Current limitations:

GUI is very simple right now and may not suit everyone's taste. But you can have a look at alternative GUI which can use MPlayer as a backend. Currently we know about one such alternative frontend, it is KMPlayer. Also everyone is encoraged to develop new GUI frontends, see slave mode description if you are interested.
Not a limitation at all, but for getting the best possible results, video resolution is recommended to be 400x224 (16:9), 320x240 (4:3) or 400x240 (15:9) in order to make the most efficient use of Nokia 770 video chip hardware pixel doubling capabilities. If you are transcoding your video before watching, preferring these resolutions can help to get very good image quality (avoid unnecessary pixels interpolation which would be required if scaling is needed) also it should reduce cpu load somewhat and provide longer battery life. N800 supports arbitrary hardware upscaling, so this notice does not apply to it.
Some file formats and codecs are not supported or poorly supported, mostly proprietary formats like real media or WMA/WMV

Installation

The latest stable version of MPlayer can be installed using single click installer: mplayer.install

Alternatively you can download .deb packages from garage project page and install them manually using application manager. The packages from garage project page are the most recent, have more new features and optimizations, but are usually less tested. Also garage download page lists a number of older packages, so in the case of any problems, you can downgrade to the version which worked better for you.

Usage

Many small resolution and low bitrate videos will work good enough even without conversion, so you can just copy them to your memory card without any extra praparation steps. But if you want to watch a high resolution or DVD video, conversion is unavoidable. You can convert video with Media Converter (if you prefer GUI interface) or 770-encode.pl script (if you prefer using command line tools). Both of these tools support presets optimized for MPlayer, be sure to use them when converting video.

After you have your videos on memory card, you can run MPlayer GUI from the start menu on Nokia 770 and select any video to play.

You can control video playback using hardware keys and all the most important actions are mapped to them (seek forward/backward, volume control, pause/resume, fullscreen/windowed mode, exit). Some more advanced settings can be changed at runtime in OSD menu which is activated with 'menu' hardware key.

Advanced users can run MPlayer from XTerminal and use lots of command line options to tweak MPlayer behaviour. These options are described in MPlayer documentation (maemo port also adds some extensions to the standard options). It is possible to save your preferred options in /home/user/.mplayer/config file in order not to type them in the command line every time. One example of such useful options may be subtitles charset if you need to change it from default utf-8 ('subcp' option). These options are also used when MPlayer is run from GUI, so you can tune it using this configuration file as you wish.

Somebody uploaded a short video featuring MPlayer on Nokia 770 to youtube.com, so you can check what it looks like: http://youtube.com/watch?v=uz9tna8VGBQ

Support and useful links

Discussion about MPlayer in the Internet Tablet Talk forum: http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2405

Please report all bugs at the garage tracker, doing so ensures that they will not be forgotten and will be fixed eventually. If unsure, ask for additional information in the forum.