Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

sindi keesan wrote:
> I was able to listen to WFMU WMA, RAM, MP3 and OGG files (but not ACC+ for
> which I have no player)

Mplayer, when given an .AAC file, stops with 'Exiting... (End of file)'.
It does the same thing with any other file that it doesn't recognize
- this must be its way of telling you that it doesn't understand the
input file. This occurs with both the old and new versions.

For comparitive purposes, I downloaded xine and xine-ui from
SW10. It works after you upgrade and install a few libraries.
xine, when asked to play an AAC file, happily does so. If you are
using the GUI, it even displays a visualization in the video
window. I haven't tried any interface other than xine-ui, so I am
not sure how well the other interfaces work.

Xine has other advantages over mplayer. For example,
mplayer does not handle DVD menus correctly. Xine does.
Mplayer has many codecs built in, so you cannot remove them
to save space (without a recompile, at least). With xine, all of
the codecs are in separate library files and you can remove
some of them without preventing xine from playing files with
other codecs. There are probably some other advantages
that I did not find.

It seems that if you want to view AAC files and DVD menus,
and you have mplayer installed as well, it would be sensible to
install xine and remove all of the codecs except the ones that
mplayer cannot handle. Such a setup would be barely larger
than mplayer alone, and would work with most a/v file formats,
both common and unusual.

Mplayer seems to handle most multimedia files better than
xine does. It also has more video output drivers than xine
and more user interface frontends. xine is nowhere near
as versatile as mplayer is, but it does have a more modular
design.

..

Switching gears: I finally figured out how to get subtitles
working in mplayer. The documentation and manpages
are very cryptic about how to do this. I finally realized that
you need to start mplayer with the -slang option to see
subtitles. I did mplayer -slang en (for English) dvd://2 and
I see subtitles!

I think I will try to help the mplayer folks fix the documentation
on this.

David