Know limitations for files above 2 GByte:
- Samba 2.x seems to be unable to seek inside large files, so MPlayer turns off navigation completely in these cases.
- Linux 2.4.x does not allow Fat32 file-systems to have files with sizes from 2..4 GByte (which would not be a problem for Windows).
- KDE (Konqueror and it's IO-slaves) typically do not handle files above 2GByte correctly. Good (command-line) tools to move files between computers are ssh and ftp.

Sorry, you have to build Your own MPlayer

SuSE 8.2 contains a defunct MPlayer - it does not contain a deinterlacer. But their version is also out-of-date. At the time of writing this text, the current version was 0.91 (released in July 2003). This version also repairs a few minor bugs. So, please download the current sources and rebuild the program (it is very easy to build the non-GUI version of it).

Another problem is that the 'official' MPlayer contains code that is illegal in some countries. If you forget to delete this, you would be able to play (or rip) copy-protected material and MPlayer would silently ignore the region code of your DVD-drive.

System Wide and per User Configuration files

MPlayer searches for configuration and font files at two different places:

• System wide: /usr/local/etc/mplayer/
  here you should find at least three files: codecs.conf, input.conf and mplayer.conf
• Per user: ~/.mplayer/
  From here you can create symbolic links, like shown below, to make MPlayer happy.

If you built your own MPlayer you find some usefully examples for the config files at /usr/src/MPlayer/etc (if your have chosen /usr/src as your build dir). If you started from scratch you may also need to download the fonts for /usr/share/mplayer/font.

# Do not forget the codecs file after building MPlayer:
cp /usr/src/MPlayer/etc/codecs.conf /usr/local/etc/mplayer

# Per user MPlayer configuration:
mkdir ~/.mplayer
cd ~/.mplayer
ln -s /usr/local/etc/mplayer/codecs.conf
ln -s /usr/local/etc/mplayer/input.conf
ln -s /usr/share/mplayer/font

For a simple computer without trills and frills you could put the following into your ~/.mplayer.config file:

# avoid lots of warnings ...
lirc = 0
joystick = 0
vc = mpeg12

# no progress output ...
quiet = 1

You can override config settings from the command line. Try the above example giving MPlayer an additional -noquiet argument.

Controlling MPlayer using the Keyboard

We do not use the GUI version of MPlayer here - the simple MPlayer does a good job for us. So you will use the keyboard to control the player. Important keys are:

• Use Esc to terminate MPlayer
• Toggle full-screen display using f
• Turn Mute on/off with m (MPlayer sometimes saves a volume of 0 if your terminate it while being muted)
• Adjust the sound volume with 0 and 9
• Navigate inside the video with Left, Right, Up, Down, Page-Up and Page-Down

If MPlayer was launched from zapdvb (or kzapdvb):

• Do not use the Space key to pause - MPlayer is fed from a pipe and will get killed as soon as the pipe gets filled up to its limit.
• The navigation keys do not work at all in this mode

If MPlayer was launched from zapcvt (or zapcut or zapfast):

• Limited Navigation is possible, try Up and Page-Up

Deinterlacing

Your will most likely need a deinterlacer for viewing movies (24 pictures/s) that were captured from TV (50 or 60 half-pictures/s). The method of transmitting half-pictures (e.g. interlacing two pictures with half the number of scan-lines) was introduced at the very beginning of TV (in the 30s of the last century) to reduce flicker without enlarging the required bandwidth.

See the example in /etc/local/bin/zapdvb.conf on how-to enable a deinterlacer. The most important thing to know about deinterlacing is that it takes a lot of CPU time. You will need almost a 1 GHz Pentium III system for a full screen display. A 2.4 GHz Celeron with slow graphics on the motherboard also works fine (SiS chip-sets for bare-bone PCs for example).