Boutique: Adding SMPlayer?

Development Discussion
1

Alternative to "Media Player Classic" on Windows.

IMO much more intuitive controls than VLC, for instance left right arrows move you along the video.

Available in the Ubuntu repos.

Also there's a really nice feature Audio -> Filters -> Volume Normalization that works very well and for which I've found no equivalent atm.

Works on i386, amd64 but I'm not able to test on arm ppc etc.

ouroumov@Box:~/Desktop$ apt-cache policy smplayer
smplayer:
  Installed: 15.11.0~ds0-1
  Candidate: 15.11.0~ds0-1
  Version table:
 *** 15.11.0~ds0-1 500
        500 http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
ouroumov@Box:~/Desktop$ apt-cache depends smplayer
smplayer
 |Depends: mpv
    mpv:i386
  Depends: mplayer
    mplayer:i386
  Depends: libc6
  Depends: libgcc1
  Depends: libqt5core5a
  Depends: libqt5dbus5
 |Depends: libqt5gui5
  Depends: libqt5gui5-gles
  Depends: libqt5network5
  Depends: libqt5script5
  Depends: libqt5widgets5
  Depends: libqt5xml5
  Depends: libstdc++6
  Depends: zlib1g
  Recommends: smplayer-themes
  Recommends: smplayer-l10n

Screenshot working on Ubuntu MATE 16.04:

X6bpebb.png1140×803 782 KB

2

But be warned: SMPlayer is so highly configurable, it’s possible, nay quite easy, to configure it beyond working. :wink:

I love SMPlayer, but it worries me that I’ve got it configured wrongly all the time even when it’s working fine.

3

I used SMPlayer for as long as I can remember. I find it lighter,and with more format support than others,like Vlc. It played videos with sound while Vlc was giving me mute films.

And in a properly configured system ,with mpv as backend ,HW decoding and vaapi output ,in a Intel HD graphics PC,it wipes the floor with the competition :smiley: .
Latest Vlc wasn’t even able to use HW decoding properly,lots of artefacts,and grey videos.

4

It might just be my nvidia drivers, but I find that vaapi causes mp4 playback to stutter, and doesn’t let filters work.

xv is the only reliable output, I find.

5

As far as I know ‘vaapi’ is used by and for Intel graphics drivers, so naturally, very likelly that wont work with nvidia.
As i said, I have Intel. I’ve ditched nvidia I had before,for being overkill on linux. My little HD 4600 gives me everything I want with great opengl support (I dont game,except for mahjong and such )

6

I think vaapi is an API layer that sits between the X application running the video and the VA driver; so there should be no reason it wouldn’t work through vdpau.

“VDPAU can also be used as a backend for the VA-API and OpenMAX IL which themselves covers a subset of VDPAU’s capabilities; so any software that uses the VA-API or OpenMAX IL is also partly capable of using VDPAU (e.g., VLC media player).”

7

I use SMPlayer because it plays everything while sometimes VLC fails and it is worst on Wndows (on which I always install MPC-HC).

8

For @SFromley

Even if its possible, it would mean -cutting your hair with a knife-kind of thing.

''The choice varies depending on your video card vendor:

For Intel Graphics use VA-API.
For NVIDIA cards use VDPAU.
For AMD cards you can use both (with mesa). ''

Taken from Arch wiki.

While it might be possible to use vdpau as a BACKEND for VA-API , that is for Intel,not for nvidia.
On nvidia you could either use vdpau,or xv/xv nvidia texture-or something similar. Dont mess them up ,please, youre gonna make an ugly soup haha

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