What's this?

SMplayer is a new front-end for mplayer coded by a friend of mine called RVM. It intends to be a much more complete front-end than the existing ones, for instance options to manage filters. SMplayer is multi-platform as it is being developed with the Qt toolkit. It works both in windows and linux, and it could be compile in other OS.

Maybe you're wondering... and what's mplayer?

Mplayer is a multimedia player, one of the best in the world. It has won a lot of awards. It was developed initially for linux but it has been ported to other OS, windows included.

Mplayer can play virtually any format (avi, mkv, mpeg...), and no need for codecs, it has its own. It's very powerfull, it has a lot of options and filters, which allow you to do almost everything you can imagine.

But unfortunately the windows version has no GUI (menus, buttons, dialog windows...) so most windows users can find it extremely difficult to use.

Some front-ends (other programs that adds menus and so on) have been developed but I find them very simple, with very few options.

Current status

The development of smplayer started December 11 2006. It's in the first stages of development. So don't expect too much, it's far from being usable.

Anyway, if you want to test it, these are the things it can do now:

• Play any video (avi, mpeg, mkv...) you have in you harddrive or external device (CD, DVD...). You may choose audio and subtitle tracks. Maybe the most important feature: it will save the current settings for each video, so when you play it later it will continue at the same point and with the same options.
  
• It should be able to play dvd discs, including selection of titles and chapters.
  
• It also can play internet streams.
  
• It's possible to add black borders to 16:9 videos, so subtitles can be shown in that area.
  
• Several deinterlace filters are available.

How to install

To install smplayer to your paldo system add my repository:

Code	[In neuem Fenster öffnen]
$ su Password: enter your root password # sed -i -e 's%<repositories>%&\n<repository>http://home.arcor.de/amsoft-linux-department/PaldoRepo/</repository>%' /etc/upkg.conf

Check also the actual packages-list from my repository.

Install smplayer with:

Code	[In neuem Fenster öffnen]
upkg-build smplayer

Has now german translation.

Version changes:

Version 0.2.12
* Using showFullScreen() instead of a normal show() for fullscreen.
* Compact mode hides the menu bar too. And moved the option from the Options menu to the Video menu. Added a key shortcut: Ctrl-C.
TODO: now it seems that other key accels (like Ctrl-F to open a file) don't work in this mode, at least with Qt 3.