How to Install SMPlayer in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

The usual readers of this blog know how much I love MPLayer (oh man, not again :P). It is one of the most advanced multimedia players that you can find. And all of those features are totally free at no cost whatsoever. But the apparent problem with it is the lack of a "decent" GUI.

For instance after installing the main engine (which is a command-line one) and if you use the "man mplayer" command for accessing the official manual then you'll be amazed by the options/features that it comes with.

But as said, the difficulty lies while "accessing" those features. Unless you're gonna love entering command by command whenever you want to play something ... it can be bloody exhausting. And as a result many other developers all around the world has come up with their own GUI/"skins" for the MPLayer Engine.

The UMPlayer is a bit new but the rest assured it is one of the most promising as well. The Gnome media player is another frond-end written using the GTK+ toolkit. But being "close" to Gnome, it won't give you a lot of features nonetheless.

In that case and as always the Qt geeks have come up with their own GUI written for it which is called SMPlayer and I gotta tell ya, it is pretty darn impressive folks!. From changing the theme to customizing advanced options such as...

*. Change Audio/Video syncing (delays, etc) errors.

*. Switch between different video drivers.

*. Gain audio and apply certain effects (both audio and video) to enhance the overall video quality.

*. Powerful Equalizer.

*. Change brightness/hue, etc.

*. Easy to use buttons (pause/play/stop, etc).

*. Resume capability (so it would start a video/audio files from the last position that you stopped it - can be disabled).

*. Change playback speed.

*. Excellent sensitivity (you know it pauses when you press the "pause button" without any noticeable delays - on most cases, etc).

*. Setup to search for subtitle files automatically from sources such as opensubtitles.org.

*. Since it uses the MPLayer engine, it plays all the multimedia codecs such as - mp3, ogg vorbis, WMA, WMV, AAC, MP4, H.264, H.263, avi, OGM, MKV... the list goes on.

*. Translation capability... are just a very few to mention.

If you use Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal or 10.10, 10.04 then you can install SMPlayer pretty easily by entering the below command in your Terminal.

sudo apt-get install smplayer

This will also install a theme pack as well. Enjoy!.