KMPlayer 0.9.3 review

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KmplayerKMPlayer is a video player plugin for Konqueror using MPlayer, Xine or GStreamer. Lik

License: GPL (GNU General Public License)
File size: 921K
Developer: Koos Vriezen
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KmplayerKMPlayer is a video player plugin for Konqueror using MPlayer, Xine or GStreamer.
Like MPlayer, the Xine and GStreamer backend are out-of-process players. So it will not crash konqueror when Xine or GStreamer crashes.

Also a simple tool for video playing and recording. Supports many playlist formats, including podcast RSS/Atom, plays all links directly from the internet. Other specialties are DVD, VCD and VDR support.

Here are some key features of "KMPlayer":
play movies from file/url using MPlayer, Xine (with *kxineplayer) or GStreamer (with *kgstplayer), making the plugin support as many as possible and, because all three are embedded external programs, keeping konqueror from crashing,
keep movie sizes ratio
volume slider using backend players' volume control and a volume slider using kmix or sound mixer applet (kicker) in the pop-down menu,
position slider
Javascript support for controlling the plugin from web page's javascript, and of course preventing script errors on pages calling these functions,
'Click to Play' support for QuickTime's HREF attribute,
lots of attributes supported, AUTOSTART, FULLSCREENMODE, CONSOLE, CONTROLS etc. Also, the CONSOLE/CONTROLS for RealPlayer plugin, allows KMPlayer to 'split-up' over multible objects,
bookmark menu in the popup menu, so you can easily bookmark a stream for later w/o having to visit the web site all the time,
support for typical used playlist formats as ASX, RAM, m3u, pls and partially SMIL and a dockable viewer for it. This allows you to easy navigate or bookmark certain streams.
recording using mencoder, mplayer -dumpstream or ffmpeg
resize/fullscreen support
proxy settings from konqueror are used to set http_proxy environment variable for backend processes,
configurable pattern matching for MPlayer and easy Xine configuration editor

The stand-alone player (libkdeinit_kmplayer.so) shares its core (libkmplayercommon.so) with the plugin's (libkmplayerpart.so) one, keeping both plugin and stand-alone player as lean (and secure) as possible.

Actually, I wouldn't be suprised if the majority of KMPlayer users only use the plugin and use one of the other great movie players for KDE for other means.

The stand-alone application can additionally:

play DVD (DVDNav only with the Xine player)
play VCD
let the backend players play from a pipe (read from stdin)
play from a TV device (experimental)
show backend player's console output
launch ffserver (only 0.4.8 works) when viewing from a v4l device
DCOP KMediaPlayer interface support
VDR viewer frontend (with *kxvplayer), configure VDR keys with standard KDE shortcut configure window
Lots of configurable shortcuts. Highly recommended for the VDR keys (if you have VDR) and volume increase/decrease.

0.9.0 versions are the begin of playlist support, but trying very hard not to dublicate the ones found in the audio players and kaffeine. Current idea is using a subset of SMIL as a document format. This means no list of playable entries, but more like a presentation.

What's New in This Release:
Fix audio/video CD w/ MPlayer adding more and more nodes on restart
MPlayer movie length detection fix for URLs in lists
Fix playlistview accessing root node w/o checking (crash fix)
XML Shareable Playlist Format (aka spiff) support
Fixed editing in place tree of URL, they were modified by KURL::prettyURL()
Fixed missing 'NotRunning' state change notification in some cases
Window title for playlists fix, either group name or item URL
Catergory items should not be editable

KMPlayer 0.9.3 keywords