For a long time I considered Mplayer the best movie player, especially on Linux. And for a long time it needed no special configuration to work like a charm – fast movie encoding, no sound problems, subtitles handling.
However on last two of my Linux systems (recent Ubuntu derivatives) it worked really bad with default configuration. Movies were played with jerking what was caused by (as I discovered) a sound driver selected. And of course there were some problems with popular Polish subtitles which often come in CP-1250 encoding. Moreover I was not sure if mplayer is making use of hardware acceleration of my graphic card, what would be nice to get smooth video with post processing. On the other hand I observed some problems with screen updates what suggested auto-selected video driver was not efficient.
After hours of experiments I came to this optimal configuration. Below is text which should be put to a file config in directory .mplayer in your home directory under Linux/Unix system:
vo=gl:yuv=2:rectangle=2
dr=1
double="yes"
ontop="1"
stop-xscreensaver=yes
ao=pulse
pp=2
subcp=windows-1250
subpos=100
subfont-text-scale=2
I will not explain what they all mean. Just to mention – this configuration aims to force direct rendering with OpenGL with double buffering.
One thing to notice: if you have problems with smooth movie playing start trying with different ao values. This option tells mplayer what audio driver (ao = audio output) to use. The command below will tell you what are available options for ao:
mplayer -ao help
