dannyman.toldme.com

MPlayer Keyboard Shortcuts

Yesterday we were abuzz on IRC because Jon Stewart appeared on Crossfire, and castigated them for doing a disservice to the people. Pretty funny to watch — if you watched it. Which I had not. And not even my TiVo could offer any help, because unlike Comedy Central, CNN doesn’t rebroadcast each show they do fifteen times a day.

Necessity being the mother of invention, I was shown the ways of BitTorrent, which distributes piping hot digital warez of all flavors through distributed bandwidth, and when Microsoft Media Player proved useless in the presence of a DiVX CODEC, I found that there was a Windows port of MPlayer, invented for Linux weenies who for a long time had limited video capabilities. Forced to fend for themselves, MPlayer now surpusses what ships with your Windows OS. So much for the value added retail price of $500 or whatever Windows costs these days.

Uhmmm, anyway, I dicovered that left and right arrows and up and down arrows skip through the video stream — it is even easier than TiVo, but I couldn’t figure out how to adjust the volume. And Google wasn’t able to get me anything useful with “mplayer keyboard shortcuts” so I will include the relevant mplayer -h output here:

Basic keys: (complete list in the man page, also check input.conf)
 <-  or  ->       seek backward/forward 10 seconds
 up or down       seek backward/forward  1 minute
 pgup or pgdown   seek backward/forward 10 minutes
 < or >           step backward/forward in playlist
 p or SPACE       pause movie (press any key to continue)
 q or ESC         stop playing and quit program
 + or -           adjust audio delay by +/- 0.1 second
 o                cycle OSD mode:  none / seekbar / seekbar + timer
 * or /           increase or decrease PCM volume
 z or x           adjust subtitle delay by +/- 0.1 second
 r or t           adjust subtitle position up/down, also see -vf expand

Anyway, we consider moving in the not-too-distant future, and would likely lose our free cable TV. If this comes to pass, I think a high-quality DSL connection and IRC would likely prove a suitable replacement for cable TV and TiVo. Cheaper, and easier! Though I would be inclined to assemble a nice, probably Linux-based interface to the television. They even have infrared remote control interfaces these days. :)

-d