KPlayer 0.5.3 review

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KPlayer is a KDE media player based on MPlayer

License: GPL (GNU General Public License)
File size: 0K
Developer: kiriuja
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KPlayer is a KDE media player based on MPlayer. With KPlayer you can easily play a wide variety of video and audio files and streams using a rich and friendly interface that follows KDE standards.

KPlayer is available in Catalonian, Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portugese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and Swedish languages.

Here are some key features of "KPlayer":
video, audio and subtitle playback from file, URL, DVD, VCD, audio CD, TV, DVB, etc., as well as KDE I/O Slaves;
volume, contrast, brightness, hue and saturation controls;
zooming, full screen and fixed aspect options;
status and progress display and seeking;
playlist;
message log;
configuration dialog;
file properties for setting file specific options.


Requirements:
A recent MPlayer

KPlayer uses the famous MPlayer as the backend for playing audio and video files and streams. This ensures the maximum variety of supported types of files and encodings.

You need to have MPlayer version 0.90 or later. Of the stable MPlayer releases 0.90 was the least buggy, but it has security issues. The same issues were present in recent unstable releases up to and including 1.0-pre3, so if you are concerned about security (as you should be), your choice would be MPlayer 1.0-pre4 or later. However, 1.0-pre4
introduced a fresh set of bugs, in particular in remote URL handling and FTP support.

If there are good binary packages for your distribution, use those.
For example on Debian unstable you would do

echo 'deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get install mplayer-k7

Substitute unstable for stable or testing as required, and k7 for 386, 586, 686 or k6, according to your processor type.

As always compiling from source is an option.

If you got an mplayer.conf in /etc/mplayer or a ~/.mplayer/config, check them to make sure that they do not have a line like "gui=yes".
Kill it dead if you find it. Use 'gmplayer' if you ever decide to use MPlayer's own GUI (not recommended).

It is perfectly fine if you want to remove the MPlayer config files entirely. However, they may be useful as an alternative way of specifying options that KPlayer does not yet support directly.

X11 and XVideo

X11 is required. Recommended versions are XFree86 4.2.x and 4.3.x, as well as X Server versions released by X.org.

XVideo extension is recommended. You can check your /etc/X11/xorg.conf or /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file for a line that reads

Load "extmod"

This is the line that loads XVideo extension, so make sure it is not disabled. Also check /var/log/XFree86.0.log to make sure that XVideo is loaded without error.

Qt and KDE

KPlayer 0.5.x supports KDE 3.3, 3.2 and 3.1, so you need to either run a relatively recent KDE (recommended) or at least have KDE libraries and the corresponding Qt libraries on your system.


What's New in This Release:
Fixed startup crash when Remember Size and/or Remember Aspect options were selected
New Portugese and Swedish translations of the user interface
Danish, French and Italian user interface translations updated
Danish, Portugese and Swedish translations of the user manual
Minor improvements and bug fixes

KPlayer 0.5.3 keywords