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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