This is the User's Guide for MPlayerGUI, written by Jason Yang, the author of MPlayerGUI.
This software is provided "as-is".
No warranty of any kind is expressed or implied.
The author will be liable for data loss, damages, loss of profits or any other
kind of less while using or misusing this software.
Any suggestions, feedback and comments are welcome.
E-Mail: jasonyang9@163.com
Web site: http://www.geocities.jp/jasonyang_jp/
PC x86 Windows 95, 98, NT, Me, 2000 & XP
MPlayerGUI is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) Front-End for MPlayer.It works under Microsoft Windows operating system. Since MPlayerGUI depends on MPlayer, you can treat MPlayer as the engine and MPlayerGUI as the shell.
For information about MPlayer, check out the MPlayer's Homepage.
- 100 MHz processor or equivalent
- 32 MB of RAM
- 20 MB available disk space
- VGA (640 x 480) or higher-resolution video adapter and monitor
- MS Windows 9x
- MS DirectX 7 (for MPlayer)
For Windows 9x users, please read this first: How to use MPlayerGUI under Windows 9x
- 500 MHz processor or greater
- 256 MB or RAM
- 20 MB available disk space
- Super VGA (800 x 600, 65k color) or higher-resolution video adapter and monitor
- MS Windows 2000 or XP
- MS DirectX 9 (for MPlayer)
To decompress .7z files, get 7-zip (Open Source) from
Or upgrade to the latest WinRar.
This is the bar used to show the progress and navigate the film or audio file.
Control Buttons are some most used functions:
Used to set the volume.
Various useful information is shown on the status bar. It shows player's current status, played time and total time. Additional information like Album, Title, Artist, Genre of current playing file are shown on the status bar also.
The playlist is a modaless dialog box, it contains a listbox and a few buttons, you can add files to the listbox and manage them and play them one by one.
The Preferences dialog has several pages, they are:
Since MPlayerGUI uses MPlayer as its engine, you have to tell MPlayerGUI where is the MPlayer binary file (ex: MPlayer.exe) located. Select "Use default settings" if you place MPlayer binary file in a directory structure like the following:
or select "Use specified Engine below:", fill the edit box with the pathname
of the MPlayer binary file you perfer. You can also use the "Browse" button to
locate it.
Don't forget to use Options | Save Settings to save your settings.
You should use dsound if it works well.
You should use directx if it works well, otherwise try directx:noaccel.
Enable Video double buffering. (According to MPlayer's Manual) Double buffering fixes flicker by storing two frames in memory, and displaying one while decoding another. It can affect OSD negtively, but often removes OSD flickering. Enable double buffering if the Subtitle is on, otherwise you can disable it.
In the Video page, you can configure video Brightness, Contrast, Hue and Saturation. These settings will not take effect during a playback, a restart is needed.
Set to show or hide the following GUI elements on startup:
When playing, you would like to disable Screen Saver, here are the options:
Enable or disable Multiple Instances of MPlayerGUI Application. In most cases, disable it.
Enable this to auto shuffle playlist everytime the playlist rewinds itself.
Enable this to let MPlayerGUI Always on Top on startup.
Enable this to start playback in Fullscreen mode (video only).
Enable or disable auto-load subtitles. To get it work, the movie file and the subtitle file must look like this:
some-movie.avi some-movie.srt
Enter the TrueType font's pathname for Subtitles. You can also use the '...' button to pick a system font. (experimental)
Select desired Subtitle Charset Encoding.
Example: To display Chinese Subtitle:
Set Font as 'C:\WINNT\FONTS\SIMHEI.TTF' (ËκÚ) Set Encoding as 'Simplified Chinese charset (CP936)'For more information, please refer the MPlayer's Manual.
Assoicate media files to MPlayerGUI, then you can play a media file by double clicking it in file manager.
Type in the file extensions to the 'Extensions' box or use the 'Load...' button to load a pre-defined file.
One sample pre-defined file: 'types.txt' is added to the release package.
After filled the 'Extensions' box, press 'Associate!' button.
This is for experienced user only! Please refer to the MPlayer's Manual.
(second link warning: huge html file)
For debugging purposes only.
During the playback, you can use these accelerator keys:
A list of links to files makes a valid generic playlist. The entry can be relative (i.e. \files\song.mp3) or specific (i.e. c:\media\files\song.mp3).
Here is a sample generic playlist file:
Sample.txt (or Sample.pls)
Alternative\Band - Song.mp3 Classical\Other Band - New Song.mp3 crap.mp3 F:\more music\foo - bar.mp3
- Alternative and Classical are sub-directories of the directory that this playlist is
stored in.
- "Band - Song.mp3" and "Other Band - New Song.mp3" are in
sub-directories that this playlist is stored in.
- "crap.mp3" is in the same directory that the playlist is stored in.
- "foo - bar.mp3" is in the specified directory, which may or may not be the
same directory the playlist is in.
You can open a playlist file or drop in a playlist file, MPlayerGUI will load the playlist and play it from the first entry in the list.
The playlist file has an extension of .txt or .pls
You can play Net Radio via the File | Open URL... command, paste the URL of Net Radio (for example: mms://160.79.128.12/smoothjazz_low) and click Open, MPlayer will connect to the server and start playback automatically.
MPlayer will cache data first, you can see the caching progress in status bar.
(Cache fill: xx.xx%)
If your Net Radio play is always buffering (and skipping), try to increase the buffer size of MPlayer by edit the config (MPlayer\mplayer\) file, for example:
cache=1024
which means the cache buffer is set to 1024 KB (1 MB), set it to a larger number to get smooth playback. Try 2048 or 4096 for example.
This leads to another issue, the initial buffering time will becomes very long, if you can't wait, use the following trick:
cache-min=10
this will tell MPlayer to start playback when the cache has been filled up to 10% of the total. Your playback starts pretty early, but still builds up a large buffer while playing, so that later download interruptions are not noticed.
See MPlayer's User Manual for details.
When playing Net Radio, the position bar is disabled, and the total playing time is always 00:00, this is normal.
Sometime the Net Radio server becomes very busy, MPlayer can't get new data from the server for a very long time, and it will stop. You can set MPlayer to retry automatically by enable the repeat mode.
This means that MPlayerGUI can not find the Engine (MPlayer). If you are using the MPlayerGUI Full Package, select 'Use default settings' in 'Engine' property page. Otherwise, specify a valid Engine.
Due to a bug in MPlayer (Bug No.320) you just can't right now! I'm sorry. I hope MPlayer Team can fix this bug soon.
http://bugzilla.mplayerhq.hu/show_bug.cgi?id=320
Or you can do this:
How to use MPlayerGUI under Windows 9x
Since there is a bug in MPlayer, when MPlayer works under Windows 9x it doesn't receive the slave commands that a front-end sends to it. It seems that all mingw builds have this problem. But the cygwin builds are not affected by this bug.
So in order to use MPlayerGUI under Windows 9x, you have to do the following steps:
SET HOME=C:
bBypassWinVersionCheck=true
Reference: http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/forums/viewtopic.php?id=95
For some unknown reasons, MPlayer.exe stops reading the stdin sometime, after a while, the command pipe jammed. In this case, you can terminate the MPlayer.exe process in the Task Manager. Thus MPlayerGUI.exe will start to response again. Anyway, you should file a bug report to me via the Email when this happens.
Try to download more codecs from MPlayer web server:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/
place them in the codecs directory of MPlayer and try again.