Yes, MPlayer runs on Windows under Cygwin and MinGW. It does not have an official GUI yet, but the command line version is completely functional. You should check out the MPlayer-cygwin mailing list for help and latest information. Official Windows binaries can be found on the download page. Installer packages and simple GUI frontends are available from external sources, we have collected then in the Windows section of our projects page.
If you wish to avoid using the command line, a simple trick is to put a shortcut on your desktop that contains something like the following in the execute section:
c:\path\to\
mplayer.exe %1
This will make MPlayer play any movie that is
dropped on the shortcut. Add -fs
for fullscreen mode.
Best results are achieved with the native DirectX video output driver
(-vo directx
). Alternatives are OpenGL and SDL, but OpenGL
performance varies greatly between systems and SDL is known to
distort video or crash on some systems. If the image is
distorted, try turning off hardware acceleration with
-vo directx:noaccel
. Download
DirectX 7 header files
to compile the DirectX video output driver. Furthermore you need to have
DirectX 7 or later installed for the DirectX video output driver to work.
VIDIX now works under Windows as
-vo winvidix
, although it is still experimental
and needs a bit of manual setup. Download
dhahelper.sys or
dhahelper.sys (with MTRR support)
and copy it to the vidix/dhahelperwin
directory in your MPlayer source tree.
Open a console and type
make install-dhahelperwin
as Administrator. After that you will have to reboot.
For best results MPlayer should use a colorspace that your video card supports in hardware. Unfortunately many Windows graphics drivers wrongly report some colorspaces as supported in hardware. To find out which, try
mplayer -benchmark -nosound -frames 100 -vf format=colorspace
movie
where colorspace
can be any colorspace
printed by the -vf format=fmt=help
option. If you
find a colorspace your card handles particularly bad
-vf noformat=
will keep it from being used. Add this to your config file to permanently
keep it from being used.
colorspace
There are special codec packages for Windows available on our
download page
to allow playing formats for which there is no native support yet.
Put the codecs somewhere in your path or pass
--codecsdir=
(alternatively
c:/path/to/your/codecs
--codecsdir=
only on Cygwin) to /path/to/your/codecs
configure
.
We have had some reports that Real DLLs need to be writable by the user
running MPlayer, but only on some systems (NT4).
Try making them writable if you have problems.
You can play VCDs by playing the .DAT
or
.MPG
files that Windows exposes on VCDs. It works like
this (adjust for the drive letter of your CD-ROM):
mplayer d:/mpegav/avseq01.dat
Alternatively, you can play a VCD track directly by using:
mplayer vcd://<track>
-cdrom-deviced:
DVDs also work, adjust -dvd-device
for the drive letter
of your DVD-ROM:
mplayer dvd://<title>
-dvd-deviced:
The Cygwin/MinGW
console is rather slow. Redirecting output or using the
-quiet
option has been reported to improve performance on
some systems. Direct rendering (-dr
) may also help.
If playback is jerky, try
-autosync 100
. If some of these options help you, you
may want to put them in your config file.
If you have a Pentium 4 and are experiencing a crash using the RealPlayer codecs, you may need to disable hyperthreading support.
You need to run Cygwin 1.5.0 or later in order to compile MPlayer.
DirectX header files need to be extracted to
/usr/include/
or
/usr/local/include/
.
Instructions and files for making SDL run under Cygwin can be found on the libsdl site.
You need MinGW 3.1.0 or later and MSYS 1.0.9 or later. Tell the MSYS postinstall that MinGW is installed.
Extract DirectX header files to
/mingw/include/
.
MOV compressed header support requires
zlib,
which MinGW does not provide by default.
Configure it with --prefix=/mingw
and install
it before compiling MPlayer.
Complete instructions for building MPlayer and necessary libraries can be found in the MPlayer MinGW HOWTO.