[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

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"How to use MPlayer on the command-line"
What is mplayer?

Basically, mplayer is a command-line movie player packaged into most slackware installations that happens to work great with music files in addition to watching movies. Because mplayer doesn't strictly require a desktop environment to be running while playing music, it is quite light and is ideal for wimpier machines such as netbooks.

How to invoke mplayer

Below are a couple of basic ways of calling mplayer.

$ mplayer ~/music/foo.mp3 # Tell mplayer to play your favourite song.
$ mplayer ~/music/*.mp3  # Tell mplayer to play all of your mp3 files under your music directory.
Useful shortcut keys

While running, mplayer can be controlled by additional keyboard input.

Some simple but memorable shortcuts:

  • spacebar - Toggles pause/play.
  • return - Next track.
Gotchas

Don't accidentally hit the arrow keys while mplayer is running; It will alter the audio playback speed (quite annoying).

Playlists

You can also tell mplayer to play tracks from a playlist. Below are some examples:


$ mplayer 
 howtos:software:mplayer ()