Ultimate MPlayer Config

MPlayer is an extremely versatile and powerful player that can be used to play just about any type of file. What many people don't know is that it also has a lot of other configuration settings that can be used to improve the playback experience a lot.

So here is a list of settings that I have found to be useful with MPlayer (Only for Windows). Edit the file <mplayer folder>\mplayer\config to use these. Anything after # is a comment

idx=yes            # Index broken files
vo=directx        # Render Via DirectX
double=yes        # Enable Double Buffering
dr=yes            # Enable Direct Rendering
ao=dsound        # Audio out via Directsound, earlier was win32
fixed-vo=yes        # Attempts to prevent reopening a windows for each file
quiet=yes        # Shuts Up Mplayer :) Windows Console is slow, so needed
really-quiet=yes    # Even quiter
#ffactor=10        # Draw outline around the OSD font   
subfont-autoscale=1    # Scale font as per movie height and not as per diagonal
subfont-text-scale=10    # Use 10% of movie size for subtitles
#osdlevel=1        # By default start with Volume and Seek OSD enabled
priority=abovenormal    # Start mplayer with abovenormal priority
framedrop=yes        # Drop frames in case of heavy CPU
autoq=100        # Automatically turn off pp filters at high CPU
vf=eq,pp=de/-al,hqdn3d    # eq = Brightness and Contrast
        # pp=de/-al Default postprocessing without Brightness/Contrast
        # High quality denoise filter
af=volume=10        # Make sounds louder. This is in dB
        # Max 60 dB = 1000 times the normal sound level
autosync=30        # Use if movie has framerate issues due to A/V sync
mc=0.2            # Maximum A/V sync corrections per fame
a52drc=1        # Adjust volume differences
dvd-device=d:        # Device from which DVD movies play
monitoraspect="4:3"    # Sets the aspect ratio of the monitor.
        # "85:48" For 1360:768 (~16:9)
        # Setting to 4:3 forces "square" movies to stretch and fill the screen
#adapter=0        # Sets which monitor to show the video on. 0 = current default
        # This is useful for multi-monitor systems where one montor is default
        # and want the video to show on the other one.
sid=0            # Subtitles to use
#aid=1            # Audio to use - useful in files with multiple audio sources

Additionally, the file input.conf in the same folder is useful to set up keyboard shortcuts. For e.g, I like using the [ and ] keys for small movements in the movie forward and backward. This is done by adding the following to input.conf:

] seek +3
[ seek -3

Once you start using MPlayer's shortcuts, any other player feels really kludgy. BTW, while mplayer also comes with a built in encoding utility (mencoder), I would recommend you use the tips given here to use VLC to do a lot of interesting things with your media.