Introduction

This brief document fetures a series of Advanced options. They are intended for users who want a bit more from mplayer than what the GUI has to offer. This is work in progress, come back later.

Filters

Video scaling

If you watch a lot of dvd videos, you are probably not satisfied with the resolution and would like to upscale the source. MPlayer can do it! The filter I use looks like this:

-vf scale=-3:1050 -sws 9

This upscales the video using the lanczos filter, until the height is 1050px. If your monitor has 1920 × 1080 pixel you can use use:

-vf scale=-3:1080 -sws 9

Hope you too can notice the difference between OSX hardware scaler and mplayer's software upscaler.

Downmixing DTS 5.1 audio to 2-channels

Alot of files come with DTS audio. if you are like me and prefer to watch videos with a good pair of headphones, you need to downmix the audio properly. Basing my calculations on this forum discussion I ended up using this filter:

-channels 6 -af pan=2:.67:.33:.33:.67:.89:.11:.11:.89:.89:.89:.89:.89

Comment by daniel.j...@gmail.com, Oct 2, 2010

If you want to automatically scale any video to fit to your screen using upscaling to do it (instead of the hardware scaler), mplayer can do it too! You need to know the resolution of your screen. My screen is 1440 by 900, so the command I use is this: -vf dsize=1440:900:0,scale=0:0

The dsize part tells mplayer what the scaled video should be - in this case to scale the video to fit to the size specified while keeping the aspect ratio the same as the original file. The scale part tells mplayer to do the actual scaling.

The advanced page allows you to specify multiple of these options and turn them on and off as you want. This way if you use different monitors or play to a tv, you can choose which resolution you scale to.

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