OneAndOneIs2

Mon, Jul 16, 2007

Yay! Another of my favourite apps

I use quite a few Portable Apps in day-to-day life. Firefox & Thunderbird routed through a Putty proxy, for starters.

The VLC player has been portable for quite a while, but it's been a little buggy, and no matter how good VLC is (and it IS good) it can't quite compete with mplayer. Which is now available as a Portable app., complete with GUI, since the CLI isn't that big on Windows...

Mplayer's excellent for various reasons. First and foremost, it plays everything. I have never found a movie file it wouldn't play. Even VLC can't make that claim. It's got superb keyboard-control. It's got no annoying GUI elements that just get in the way (something that always turned me away from Xine.)

The only thing mplayer doesn't do is DVD menus. It'll play DVD movies, but you have to know what track to point it at - on the few occasions where it isn't track one. No big problem, esp. since my DVD drive is currently broken...

Even the music files sound better played through mplayer - although that might just be because its volume is turned up rather high [Smiley]

4 comments • Categories: Omni, FOSS, My Life

Comments:

Comment from: tuxdev [Member]

Woot! I don't have to use crashy VLC anymore! MPlayer is definitely the most awesome video player (but impossible to package right). I'll be sure to get this tommorow at work.

Permalink 17/07/07 @ 04:12

Comment from: hari [Member]

· http://hari.literaryforums.org

Mplayer's excellent for various reasons. First and foremost, it plays everything. I have never found a movie file it wouldn't play.

It all depends on the codecs installed. Even mplayer can be seriously crippled (as it is crippled on many distributions due to patent restrictions with many windows codecs)

Permalink 18/07/07 @ 05:32

Comment from: sokuban [Member]

The link that shows how to route firefox through putty is broken, it takes me to the blog's main page.

I really need something like that now, I'm in China and a lot of stuff is blocked, namely wikipedia. I have a friend somewhere in Europe with a Linux server, so if I route putty through that I should be able to get on wikipedia but I don't know how to.

Permalink 19/07/07 @ 05:27

Comment from: oneandoneis2 [Member] · http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/

Yeah, I upgraded a day or two ago and it messed up the URLs. Courtesy of a helpful chap on the b2evolution forum, this is now fixed and the links should work properly again.

Permalink 19/07/07 @ 09:38