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MPlayer, as I had mentioned in my previous post on my Top 3 Audio/Video players, is a media player for Linux, which supports almost all kinds of audio and video formats. It can even play semi-corrupted, and semi-downloaded files. And it rates # 1, as my most favourite and preferred video player.

It is, by creation, a player for Linux, coded by Astral and team. It is essentially a command line operated player, but later on GUIs were introduced for it. Of late, it has GUIs even in Windows, but these GUIs are not very stable, and often destroy the stable credibility of MPlayer. The MPlayer is now available for all operating systems – Linux, Unix based OSes, Windows, and Mac OS X.

How to install MPlayer -

For Linux, go to http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html . They have a very good explanation on how to install MPlayer on Linux. Of late, MPlayer comes as the default AV(audio/video) player in many Linux distros.

For Mac OS X, go to http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/ . They’ve developed a very good GUI for MPlayer on Mac. Its as simple as download, install, and drag and drop to play.

For Windows, the procedure is a bit more tedious, but worth the effort.

1. Go to http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html and download the MPlayer 1.0rc2 Windows.
2. After downloading, unzip the package to somewhere easy to remember. For example, unzip it to C:\Program Files\MPlayer so that its easy to locate at a future date.
3. For Windows XP and 2000, go to Step 4. For Windows 98 and previous, go to step 5.
4. Next, go to your Documents and Settings folder. By default, it will be in the root directory, C:\, but could differ if you’ve changed the location or have installed Windows in a different directory. In Documents and Settings, chose the folder which corresponds to your Windows username. i.e. If your Windows username is Geekboy. open the folder Geekboy in the Documents and Settings folder. Inside that folder, there will be a hidden folder called SendTo. If you can see it, open it. If you can’t, either enable the View Hidden Folders (Tools > Folder Options > View > Show Hidden Files and Folders > OK) or append "SendTo" (without the quotes) in the address bar. Go to step 6.
5. (for Windows 98 and previous versions) Go to your Windows folder (by default, it should be C:\Windows\). There will be a hidden folder named "SendTo". Open it. (if you can’t see it, either append SendTo to the address bar, or enable viewing of hidden files by going to Folder Options).
6. Create a shortcut (Right Click > New > Shortcut) and point the shortcut to a file named mplayer.exe in our MPlayer folder (in our example, C:\Program Files\MPlayer\mplayer.exe). You’re all set to go!
7. Now, to play a file using MPlayer, right click on the file, and scroll over Send To  and click Mplayer. Enjoy!

To get an idea of the controls in Windows, go to Interactive Control in the MPlayer Manual.

But here are a few basic controls -

• f – to toggle fullscreen
• arrow keys – to fast forward/rewind
• Page Up and Page Down – to fast forward/rewind by 10 minutes
• p – Pause/Play
• q or Esc – to quit
• / and * OR 9 and 0 - increase and decrease volume
• m – to mute sound
• o – to toggle timer

Those are the basic controls. There are more advanced controls for everything from increase/decrease movie speed to adjusting hue/brightness/colour etc. Check out Interactive Control for more information.

Supported Media Formats

• Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs* Container formats: 3GP, AVI, ASF, FLV, Matroska, MOV (QuickTime), MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia
• Video formats: Cinepak, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV
• Audio formats: AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Intel Music Coder, Monkey’s Audio, MP3, RealAudio, Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA
• Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, Sami, SRT, SubViewer, VOBsub, VPlayer

I hope that this post was useful and informative. Enjoy the MPlayer world!

[tags]MPlayer, media player for linux, linux media player, MPlayer windows, Windows media, play all formats, movie player, best media player[/tags]

(image copyright Facebook SuperWall App)

Hello dear reader!

I wish you a very happy and prosperous New Year 2008!

Mohan

[tags]new year[/tags]

Hi all,

I’ll be back home tomorrow, to my own sweet domain, from the perilous clutches of a hostel… Expect my next post tomorrow…

Until then,
Adios amigos,
Mohan (aka Neo Garfield)

Hello all,

I’ve often been asked which was my favourite AV player. Five years ago, I used to respond with "Winamp" or "Power DVD". But now, I should say, my opinions have changed. And thats why I laugh when people say that their favourite player is Real Player, or QuickTime. Right now, after having used most of the available audio/video playing software, I have formed a few of my favourites. And I thought that I would share them with you…

# 1 – Mplayer

Mplayer – an audio/video player for Linux, comes in as my all time favourite AV player. It can play as many video or audio clips as you want simultaneously. It has never crashed for me. It can play semi downloaded files, files with the wrong extension, and once, it has even played a zipped file! Any file with an audio or video track can be played with Mplayer. On Windows, you need to do a manual install, with a Send To shortcut to make it work. It does not have a GUI, but its amazingly powerful. Visit the Mplayer website for more information. Information on how to install and use Mplayer in your Windows system coming up in my next post.

# 2 – VLC Player

Almost as powerful as Mplayer, with a neat GUI, ladies and gentlemen, in second position comes VLC Player. Cross platform support and freeware – 2 words which make VLC magical! It can, like Mplayer, play isolated DVD files, all sorts of music and video files. But sometimes, especially in case of a defective DVD video file, your system hangs. If you like power, and no fancy stuff, but still a GUI, go in for VLC Player.

# 3 – Windows Media Player 11

Stylish and hot, WMP 11 creates a whole new AV experience for Windows users. Free to install for "genuine" Windows users, this awesome looking player is a complete package for any home user. Vista looks, audio/video tweaking, library feature, sync with music players, stable performance etc. are the main features of WMP 11. It comes in as # 3, even above iTunes, because of its fast and stable performance, cool looks, and easy to use sync feature. You can download WMP 11 from the Microsoft website.

Yes, thats my top 3. I hope that you’ve found this post useful. And no, Real Player, QuickTime etc. are not among my favourites. In fact they feature at the end of my favour list… Just below my top 3, comes DivX, iTunes, Powe DVD etc.

[tags]top 3, audio video players, audio players, video players, audio software, video software, av software, top 3 audio video players[/tags]

Hello all,

Facebook, the popular social networking website, has introduced a new type human verification system – using phone numbers to verify your "humanness" ( ) permanently, rather than using a CAPTCHA every single time.

Earlier, like in most other websites, you needed to enter a CAPTCHA code (an image verification system) for every single "questionable" action you took. This could get to be quite annoying, as a person will have to strain his eyes to read the scrambled text displayed by the image. And it also takes away precious time. Thus, an alternative had to be brought in soon.

Facebook has seemingly pioneered this alternative. They have introduced verification by phone. i.e. Instead of the CAPTCHA, you can confirm your phone number, and get rid of CAPTCHAs on Facebook for ever.

You’ll be asked to enter your mobile number, along with your country code. A message containing a verification code is SMSed to your mobile phone, which has to be entered in Facebook. And voila, bye bye CAPTCHA!

V

V

I don’t know how long this system has been existence, but it sure wasn’t there a couple of weeks back. This is a pretty good alternative to CAPTCHA, but gives rise to questions about privacy.

Also, the question arises – why can’t CAPTCHA be one time? If phone verification can be one time, why not CAPCTHA? The idea behind CAPTCHA at every step is to prevent bots from being unleashed after a human sign up.  Now, with phone verification, a bot creator (Homo sapien sapien) could sign up, verify using his mobile phone, and let loose the bots of hell! Facebook will have to look into this factor.

Anyway, most of the Facebook users will opt for the mobile verification, since it get rids of CAPTCHA permanently, a great relief while posting URLs or adding friends.

[tags]facebook, captcha, verification, mobile verification, phone verification, sms verification, verification code, captcha alternative[/tags]

Hi all,

I was a bit late to catch up on this news, but Google is planning to release a Wikipedia-Squidoo style social content website. Christened "Knol", Google calls this a "tool" which will "encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it".

In short, Google is trying to chase an area, in which Wikipedia currently rules the roost. With a big difference – Google will be commercializing Knol. Which means that a user can opt for an advertisement, Google Adsense of course, on his/her article pages, and he/she gets a "substantial share" of the revenue.

(click to enlarge)

Now the debate raging throughout the web is whether Google will give unfair advantage to pages from Knol on their search results.

Extract from the Official Google Blog

"Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

I hope that Udi Manber, the writer of this post in the Google blog means what he said in a positive sense.

Anyway, experts argue that the Google brand will give value to these Knols, which will encourage users to link to Knols, and thus organically increase the ranking of Knols. This is again a far cry, since this same image and reputation exists even for Wikipedia. Ok, so Google is set to earn profit for Knol, unlike Wikipedia, but does that really matter?

Meanwhile, I’ve contacted a couple of my friends, well placed at Wikipedia, to try and get invites to Google Knol. Hopefully, they might succeed, and give me an insider review.

Now, bloggers are opining that Google is going a step too far with Knol. To be exact, Duncan Riley of TechCrunch. He’s given quite a comprehensive insight into how Google could do foul play with Knol, but then, Riley is known for his hopelessly ridiculous What-If posts (not that his intuitions are not accurate, but sometimes, when he plays with the "hot" of the moment, he gets carried away; otherwise, his reviews are excellent).

"He’s right. Google is moving away from simply indexing the worlds content to being a content provider itself. Of course Google in response would argue that it is simply facilitating user generated content (like with Blogger), that ultimately they are the host as opposed to the creator, but it still competes with existing content providers, many of whom rely on Google search results for their living. Which takes us to question of search results.

(TechCrunch)

Well, pretty true that Google is moving towards being a content provider, so what? So whats the big deal? If Google doesn’t cash in unethically, then why the big hue and cry?

Well, I guess we’ll wait and see…. And then we’ll decide to knol, or not to knol…

[tags]google knol, knol, knowledge, social content, wikipedia, squidoo, advertisements, make money, write articles[/tags]

Interactive Souls Engine – Virtual Tarot – reads your mind…

In other words, a perfect way to split your friend’s psyche and make him/her start worshipping all forces of fate, luck, and God.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I had the most curious of experiences today, when I thought that I was in a highly spiritual domain, but was in fact ’sucked’ to the core. It all started with me walking quite unnecessarily into the college Internet lab. There, I found two of my friends in an overly excited state ogling one of the computer screens with as much ‘oomph’ into their ogle as they’d seen a very beautiful and attractive girl. Needless to say, there WAS a girl sitting in between them, with a smug self satisfied expression on her face.

The trio invited me to a highly spiritual experience – I saw that they had the site called Peter Answers open. The girl typed in a petition (Peter, please answer:) and a question (Who just walked in?). I was like the all-in-all geek and dismissed the whole thing with a haughty wave of my hand, when to my utter astonishment, the words on screen formed "Mohan". I was digging my sub consious mind for all that I’d learned about iterations and random selections, when she asked what I was wearing to ‘Peter’, who promptly replied with my exact costume.

To find out what was amiss, I myself tried it out, and found that "I didn’t believe in spirits". The three musketeers told me that the phenomenon was true to only a select few. I tried the game a couple more times, and by lucky coincidence, the words on screen and my thoughts and feelings matched once. I fell into deep contemplation, and later undisturbed prayer. I started thanking all Gods for having achieved this state above Maslow’s Self Actualization – Transcendental stage! I started spreading the word to all my friends, till the logical me decided to look into the source…

The Source took me to a few lines of Ajax. "Ajax is God!" I reflected and continued looking… Hmmmm… Fishy…. Something extremely fishy… I decided to appeal to the God of the Internet, the master who controlled all what came in, and kicked out all which had to be out, the undisputed king of the entire Internet – Google. With a few references, and a closer look at the source, revealed a fantastic trick hidden beneath those spiritual theological layers.

An excellent way to trick your friends, like I was buffooned into this!

But before I continue, check out the site and give it a couple of tries.

The trick is simple enough. The "Petition" field is a farce. Hit the "." (period) and type – you’ll find text appearing out of nowhere. Whatever you type after hitting the period will be the text intended to appear. Put in the answer to your question here.

Now type the question as if nothing happened in the "Question" field. And moment you hit "?" the text you typed in in the Petition after the dot will appear! Voila! Abracadabra! Wingardium Leviosa! (woops, wrong one )

So how can it be used? Simple enough again. Get a few friends together, and tell them that you’ve reached self actualization, and that you could communicate with the netherworld. Ask you friends to ask the questions. If they know the answer, tell it out loud. Or if its an opinion, like in "Does she love me?" and stuff, just form the most witty answer yourself. Hit period and start typing the answer in the Petition field, and the question as normal! Enjoy

[tags]peter answers, fun, peter, answers, trick, trick friends, interactive souls engine,psychic answers[/tags]

Hi all,

The Online Games blog has listed a very good list of the top 10 3D Linux based games in a blog post which came up today. Typically, like these Top Blah Blah stuff get top clicks in socially promoted content, like in Digg, reddit etc., this Top 10 also got featured on the Digg front page. Owing to the fact that he/she’s hosted on Blogger, ths site hasnt crashed yet. The images are on flickr, so we can expect the blog to withstand the Digg effect.

Anyway, the reason why I point to this post is that, unlike all other Top 10 stuff, this post seems to be written with more than one aim.

• One aim is definitely to get onto Digg and receive a lot of Digg Juice
• Another aim, which I feel is relevant, is that everyone was downtrodding Linux for the fact that Linux didn’t have many good games to play. This seems like a plea from the heart of a hardcore Linuxian that Linux isn’t all bad.

The post was an eye opener for me. I, like many others, had believed that Linux didn’t sport many good games. But after seeing games like America’s Army and Nexiuz on the list, I’m forced to change my opinion. I never knew that these were available for Linux!

Ok, so I’m not a certified Linux geekie. I love my Photoshop and Dreamweaver and Flash and so on and so forth. I can’t part with all these… And GIMP is a substitute for MS Paint, not Photoshop!

But I don’t have anything against Linux, and I have Ubuntu on dual boot back home. But still, I never knew that there were such good games available for Linux.

So by this post, this guy got on the Digg front page, and enlightened 20,000 Digg visitors about the best games available on Linux. Keep up the good work buddy!

[tags]linux games, 3d games, 3d linux games, games, linux[/tags]

Hi all,

I just noticed that I had got my Google PageRank back. Well, not exactly back, but I’m now better off than 0. I had a PR of 4 before, until Google started penalizing blogs for displaying paid links which did not have the "nofollow" tags. I was advised by a Google contact of mine on what to do, and now I’ve got a PR of 2 – which I attribute to my inactivity.

Steps to recover your PageRank if you’ve been penalized by Google –

1. Remove the paid links
2. OPTIONAL : Append rel="nofollow" to all hyperlinks in your site to "shifty" webpages
   eg : <a href="http://the page here . html" title="Page here" rel="nofollow"> Link </a>
3. Go to Google Webmaster Central and sign up, if you haven’t already
4. Log in and click on "Request Reconsideration"
5. Select your site, check the checkbox, and explain in the text box truthfully about what happened, why it happened, how you got to know the Google guidelines only now, what actions you’ve taken, what all you’ve removed, and that your site now complies with all Google guidelines. After all this, hit the button which says "Request Reconsideration". You’re done!

Now wait for a couple of weeks (2-4 weeks). If your case is genuine, and you’ve been honest, you’ll get your Google PageRank back. Thats what happened to me, and many others. I wish you luck!

[tags]five steps, get back pagerank, google pagerank, google pr, google, pagerank, blog pr[/tags]

Hello,

Many of us would have wanted to shift from Blogger to Wordpress. But you must be put off by the fact that you would have to start all over again – visitors, feeds, Google PR, advertisers and so on… I’ve seen very many posts on the technical details on how to make the shift. A week back, my friend Amit from Digital Inspiration posted a blog on how to make the shift from Blogger to Wordpress without lasting damage in terms of visitors, RSS readers, and so on.

I found it quite useful, but since I didn’t have any more Blogger blogs (atleast none with a huge visitor count and stats) I couldn’t test it… It might turn out to be very useful for you. I reccomend this article as a MUST READ for anyone planning to shift from Blogger to Wordpress.

Check out Digital Inspiration.

Cheers

[tags]blogger to wordpress, shifting, blogs[/tags]