I am currently not trying to get MPlayer patches accepted upstream. Specifically cosmetic patches that improve the user experience for me, but that are in general a matter of taste, seem not worth the hassle.
Back in the day, MPlayer did not show DVD subtitles, unless a subtitle track was selected. Some (quite long) time ago that changed. MPlayer will now randomly select one of the available subtitle tracks of the DVD and display this, if no subtitle track is manually specified.
You can turn the subtitle visibility to off after starting playback
(default key is v) or give the -nosub option on the
command line. Since there is no -nonosub option, you cannot
add nosub to the MPlayer config and turn subtitles on for
selected video DVDs using command line options.
When using my
dvdmovie
script, you could add -nosub for every
video DVD containing subtitles to your $HOME/.dvdmovierc file,
if you don't want the subtitles displayed. This, of course, is a lot of
work that should not be needed. My dvdmovie script is intended
to work without DVD specific configuration most of the time.
IMHO MPlayer should do the right thing and not display DVD subtitles by default. I have written a patch for MPlayer to do this. Subtitle visibility is turned off unless a subtitle is specified using one of MPlayer's mechanisms to do so (e.g. command line option or subtitle file next to movie file). As a result MPlayer does the right thing, at least for me. ☺
I am using this patch since September 2011. I have sent the patch to the MPlayer development mailing list, but it has not been accepted for inclusion.
Download mplayer-default_subtitle_visibility_off.patch.
With default verbosity settings, when pausing playback, MPlayer will place the PAUSE status message in a new line beneath the status line. After unpausing, a new status line replaces the PAUSE message, with the stale pre-pausing status line kept visible. This adds garbage to the terminal window that should not be there IMHO. I have written a small patch that keeps the PAUSE message in the same line as the status line.
Download mplayer-pause-msg-in-same-line.patch.
When playing an audio file (i.e., without video), MPlayer's status line uses a different format than for video files. The number of seconds, both for the current position and for the total length of the file, is augmented by displaying the times as hours, minutes, and seconds. While minutes and seconds are extended by a leading zero if below 10, hours are extended (left padded) by a space character if below 10. But since the time in hours, minutes, and seconds is displayed inside paranthesis, when the time is one hour or longer, but less than 10 hours, there is a space between the opening parenthesis and the hour value. The hour value and thus the space padding is omitted for time values below one hour.
I do not like this space character. I would prefer no left padding of the hour value. Thus I have written a small patch for this. I did not left pad the hour value with a zero, because I mostly hear audio files that are less than 10 hours long, and the hour value is not limited to two digits like the minute and second values in this format.
Download mplayer-better_audio_only_status_fmt.patch.
NULL Pointer in
stream/stream_dvd.c::list_chapters()*** This has been fixed in MPlayer svn revision 36908, so this patch is obsolete. ***
MPlayer cannot play the German DVD of Resident Evil: Extinction
using the
dvd:// protocol (using dvdnav:// works). Reason
is a NULL pointer dereference while building a chapter list
(which will be
printed with the -identify option and not used otherwise) in
the function stream/stream_dvd.c::list_chapters(). The root
cause is very likely a badly mastered DVD, but MPlayer should not crash
on malformed input.
One way of tackling the problem would be skipping the
stream/stream_dvd.c::list_chapters() function unless the
-identify option is given. This would result in working
playback of this DVD if the main title track number is already known.
To find out the track number, the -identify option is very
useful, unless it crashes MPlayer. Thus I do not recommend this.
(My dvdmovie script uses -identify
to find the main title.)
The obvious solution to this problem is not dereferencing the
NULL pointer. I have
reported
the issue in the MPlayer Bugzilla and written two patches to fix this
(first version,
second version),
but the solution was not deemed appropriate and the issue still persists.
(*** This has been fixed in MPlayer svn revision 36908. ***)
The second version of the patch might be more robust, because it just
ignores NULL entries. The first is more conservative and safe,
because it aborts the chapter list function on the first encountered
NULL entry.
I have been using the second version of the patch since February 2013 without problems with a lot of DVDs.
Download mplayer-dvd-fix_re3_playback-v2.patch.
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