mplayer notes

Mplayer is my favourite media player as it plays nearly every kind of media file and is the most powerful media player I know in terms of functionality (like filters) and flexibility. I also like the UI (command line and a simple window, no stupid controls, everything goes by the keyboard, I hate the GUI's for it). It just happens to have one of the longest manual pages I ever saw too, and it takes some time to find something in there. That's why I'm writing up the options that I happen to find useful, kind of like a filter for the manpage.

Setting aspect radio:

• -aspect 16:9
• -aspect 2.3

Setting deinterlancer:

• -vf pp=lb

Rebuild index for partial videos:

• -idx
• -forceidx
  

Replay media in loops:

• -loop
• -loop 0 ## endless loop
• -loop 5 ## repeat 5 times

Shuffle media:

• -shuffle

Seek and cut specified position:

• -ss 10 ## skip the first 10 seconds
• -ss 1:30:00 ## seek to stream position 1:30:00
• -endpos 50 ## stop after 50 seconds of playback
• -endpos 1:40:00 ## stop at stream position 1:40:00

Play sound only (don't play video):

• -vo null

Here is an example of how to extract only the sound track of a video file from position 0:24 to 1:54:

• mplayer -vo null -ss 0:24 -endpos 1:32 [input-filename] -ao pcm:file=[out-filename]