MPlayer 1.0rc1 released

We wish to thank the Google Summer of Code project for sponsoring the FFmpeg project. Thanks to the SoC program for 2006, the FFmpeg project was able to get help from students to implement more native codecs.

The highlights of this release are native VC-1/WMV3, On2 VP5 and VP62 (used in some Flash video files) decoding, which works even on non-Intel platforms and SSA/ASS/color subtitles.

Furthermore we can now run natively on Intel Macs (you just have to pass --disable-loader --disable-mp3lib to configure), -endpos was finally added to MPlayer and the Windows GUI has seen a number of improvements.

Vorbis decoding has seen a big speedup, as has H.264. The optimizations to H.264 are still ongoing, but the difference should already be noticeable.

And last not least many bugs were found and fixed since pre8.

MPlayer 1.0rc1 will no longer load a file-specific configure file located in the same directory as the file you're playing, because of potential security concerns (thanks to Rudolf Polzer for pointing this out); if you want to restore the old behavior add -use-filedir-conf.

If you already have the binary codec package from pre8 you don't need to redownload it: The new 20061022 packages do not contain any new codecs, they just miss some that now work natively.

MPlayer 1.0rc1: "Codename intentionally left blank"

DOCS:

• German documentation translation finished
• Russian documentation translation synced and almost finished

Drivers:

• IVTV hardware MPEG audio/video decoder output
• ALSA audio output: AC3 passthrough now works even when the device name of the digital output port has been set by the user
• bicubic OpenGL scaling works with ATI cards
• md5sum switched to the libavutil MD5 implementation
• support for libcaca 1.0 via compatibility layer

Decoders:

• liba52 updated to 0.7.4 (slightly faster)
• SSE optimizations for mp3lib
• removed support for obsolete and non-free divx4 libraries

Demuxers:

• audio stream switching in MPEG-TS/PS, Matroska and streams supported by libavformat
• audio stream switching between streams with different codecs
• libavformat demuxer now honors -alang
• chapter seeking in Matroska files
• fixed seeking to absolute and percent position for libavformat demuxer
• NUT demuxer using libnut
• Matroska SimpleBlock support

Inputs:

• split of stream layer from libmpdemux to new stream library
• PVR input for hardware MPEG encoder based cards, such as Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150/250/350/500 AKA IVTV but also pvrusb2 and cx88 (requires Linux >= 2.6.18 kernel, featuring native V4L2 MPEG API)
• native RTSP input (handles MPEG-TS over RTP) for generic RTSP servers
• support for seeking to chapters in dvd:// and dvdnav:// streams
• radio support (radio://)

FFmpeg/libavcodec:

• VC-1/WMV3/WMV9 video decoder
• Vorbis decoding speedup, now default Vorbis decoder
• VMware Video decoder
• On2 VP50 and VP62 decoder
• lossless audio decoders: WavPack, TTA, Shorten
• CAVS decoder
• GXF muxer/demuxer
• MXF demuxer
• much improved FLAC encoder
• more H.264 decoding speed improvements, plus support for -lavdopts fast
• Theora decoder fixes
• preliminary Vorbis encoder
• MTV demuxer

GUI:

• Windows version added
• drag-and-drop ignored last file
• save and load cache setting correctly
• working audio stream selection for Ogg and Matroska files
• executable names like gmplayer_old etc. will now start GUI as well
• -gui/-nogui options
• xinerama fixes, now behaves similar to MPlayer without GUI

Filters:

• MMX-optimizations for -vf yadif
• MMX-optimizations for -vf zrmjpeg

MEncoder:

• support of x264 encoding via libavcodec
• rewrite -x264encopts option parser to use the 264 option parser; likely breaks 3rd party tools as the syntax of some options has changed
• removed support for obsolete and non-free divx4 libraries

Ports:

• partial Intel Mac support, --disable-loader --disable-mp3lib is needed
• OpenGL can now create windows > screen size under Windows
• allow filenames starting with for remote paths on Windows

Others:

• SSA/ASS subtitle renderer
• -endpos option for MPlayer
• -correct-pts option
• UTF-8 used for OSD and subtitles, some bitmap fonts will no longer work correctly and -subcp must be set for all non-UTF-8 subtitles
• more audio-truncation fixes
• libavutil mandatory for MPlayer compilation
• more intuitive -edlout behaviour
• -nortc is now default since -rtc has disadvantages with recent kernels

Program Information Category: Multimedia Type: Free Version: 1.0 RC1 Size: Works on: Multiple Product page: here