MPlayer is not your run-of-the mill video player. It's a multi-platform codec-chewing monster truck of a video player for the connoisseur of video players. It has options galore and has the flexibility to play almost anything under the sun.

Typically, I wouldn't recommend MPlayer for new Linux users any more than I'd recommend Vim for folks who just want to edit a few lines of text. It's extremely capable and can be tamed with one of the many GUIs available (MPlayer, that is), but it's got quite a bit of complexity and can be less than user-friendly at times. But for those who are willing to roll up their sleeves and dig in, MPlayer makes a fine video player.

About MPlayer

MPlayer is sort of the Swiss Army Chainsaw of media players. It handles a gob of input formats and codecs. It also spits out video to a ridiculous number of devices. Everything from the standard X11 out to support for text mode rendering, drivers for Mac OS X and Windows, and a slew of specific video cards and sound cards as well. In short, if flexibility is your watchword, MPlayer is the tool to choose.

I won't go into all of the formats supported by MPlayer, but it does handle pretty much all the codecs that you'd run into today. If you want to watch QuickTime, Windows Media, H.264, RealVideo, Theora, etc., you should be able to with MPlayer. I suspect there's a secret option for playing back video on your toaster, but I haven't found it yet or I have an incompatible toaster, and I'm leaning towards incompatible toaster.

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