14 DAY TRIAL // Only three weeks after the announcement of the MPlayer 1.2 open-source video player software, today, February 16, 2016, the project's development team has unveiled the MPlayer 1.3 release.
As reported by us yesterday, February 15, the FFMpeg 3.0 open-source multimedia framework made a surprise appearance and brought in a great number of new features, so the biggest new addition to MPlayer 1.3 is, of course, support for FFmpeg 3.0.
Best of all, the MPlayer devs have gone to all the trouble of including the full FFmpeg 3.0 sources into the freely distributable source package of the MPlayer 1.3.0 release, which GNU/Linux users can fetch right now from the official website of the project.
"MPlayer 1.3.0 is compatible with the FFmpeg 3.0.x releases and (at the time of writing) with FFmpeg git. The tarball already includes a copy of FFmpeg 3.0, so you don't need to fetch it separately," reads today's announcement.
What else is new in MPlayer 1.3
Besides including the brand new FFmpeg 3.0 open-source multimedia framework, the MPlayer 1.3.0 release brings support for some new codecs and media file formats, as well as cleanups to the internal code and fixes for many of the bugs reported by users since MPlayer 1.2.
Additionally, there are a bunch of performance enhancements and tweaks borrowed from the FFmpeg project, which is a sister project of MPlayer, and multiple updates to support all the API (Application Programming Interface) changes that happened in the upstream FFmpeg 3.0 project.
But users shouldn't notice any visible modifications, as most of these changes are under the hood. However, they might experience various corner-cases in the order of channels for multi-channel files. MPlayer 1.3.0 is now available for download via our website, but it should also be in your Linux OS' repos in the coming days.