Smplayer instructions for use. Tweaking smplayer to improve performance. General SMPlayer settings
Simple and convenient video player based on codecs standard Windows Media, but much more convenient to use. It has many convenient features for videos with subtitles. According to reviews - best player for anime fans.
I don’t know about you, but I personally haven’t watched films on TV for a long time. Firstly, if you have nice collection video discs, you can watch your favorite films in much best quality than what television shows. And secondly, you can enjoy watching movies at any convenient time! But watching videos on a computer is associated with some, albeit small, difficulties. The first is the age-old problem of codecs.
In principle, it can be solved quite easily - we just need to install a certain package of video encoders/decoders (for example, K-Lite Codec Pack) compatible with the standard Windows player. The second problem is that often the capabilities of standard Windows Media There is not enough Player - and here the problem of choosing an alternative player arises.
However, there are a number of software players that initially, often possessing greater functionality than a standard player, also include a number of the most common built-in codecs. Thus, these programs solve the problem of playing video on a computer in one fell swoop.
We have already talked about very good player Daum PotPlayer, and today I would like to introduce you to another representative of programs of this class - SMPlayer. Despite the similar names of the players, they turned out to be very different both in function and in general solution.
If Daum PotPlayer was originally developed as an alternative video player for Windows, then SMPlayer “came” to us from Linux. As for the functionality, we can formulate the main advantages of both players: Daum PotPlayer - has many useful tools for correcting and improving sound quality (and partly video), while SMPlayer is more aimed at watching DVD videos and films with multiple audio tracks and subtitles .
You can compare SMPlayer with a paid video player - CrystalPlayer Professional.
Comparison of the free video player SMPlayer with the paid analogue CrystalPlayer Professional
The conclusion from the table is “why pay more” ;)? With a simple and uncluttered interface, SMPlayer consumes less system resources than its paid analogue, and also has a number of other advantages (more on that later).
Installing SMPlayer
A fairly simple installer will help you install SMPlayer. We can interfere with his actions twice. The first time you are prompted to select a program language:
And the second, when we are offered a choice of program configuration:
At this point, it is best to select the “Recommended” installation type. This will install all the necessary program components necessary for comfortable everyday work.
SMPlayer interface
Once the installation is complete, you can immediately begin working with the program. Let's launch SMPlayer and look at its working window:
If you have ever worked with software media players, then the SMPlayer interface will not seem unusual to you. Below the viewing window are the main video playback control buttons. The menu bar is traditionally placed at the top. The only element that looks somewhat new is the toolbar. On it, among other fairly clear icons, there are two buttons: “Sound” and “Subtitles”.
In most cases, if you click on one of these buttons while watching a movie in AVI format, you will see the message “Nothing”. The fact is that these buttons allow you to receive fast access to alternative audio tracks and subtitles in a DVD or video in an MKV container, for example.
To better understand the features of the program, I offer you a short “tour” through the SMPlayer menu panel.
And our first stop is the “Open” menu.
The screenshot clearly shows all the options for opening video files for playback. In addition to the usual playback from a file and from a disk, we have a number of additional features.
Those who like to store DVD movies on their hard drive will like the function of directly opening a DVD from a specific folder (while all menus remain functional!). And fans of online video and radio stations will appreciate the ability to watch/listen to their favorite channels directly through the SMPlayer interface.
To do this, just select the type of online multimedia content (TV or Radio) and enter the address in the specially designated window desired station. Let's move on :).
With your permission, we will not consider the “Playback” menu. I can only say that all the buttons and settings that are responsible for playing video in this moment(play, pause, stop, rewind, etc.).
Video settings
The next menu is much more interesting - “Video”.
If we compare the video processing capabilities with those of the same Daum PotPlayer, for example, then SMPlayer, of course, lags behind it in terms of their number. In SMPlayer we can adjust the aspect ratio of the video, apply some filters to improve the quality (for example, reduce noise or remove edge artifacts), and also set the rotation angle of the image.
Among interesting opportunities Here we should check "Video Equalizer". In practice, these are fairly standard settings for contrast, brightness, saturation, etc. for video players. But thanks to the fact that they are all collected in one place and processing occurs immediately during playback, there is a good opportunity to experiment with video parameters (and sometimes significantly improve its quality).
There is also the opportunity to take both a single screenshot and a serial one. All that is required for this is to specify in the settings the folder for saving screenshots. And “for starters” we are offered a rather interesting opportunity called “Preview”.
SMPlayer, when we press this button, gives us full information about video parameters (duration, format, bitrates, etc.) and creates a series of screenshots of the current movie in chronological order. Thus, we can (or cannot :)) understand the main plot of the film from this series of photographs. We can save the screenshots taken on the hard drive (in the movie folder, for example).
Sound settings
We don’t have very much (again comparatively) in the “Sound” menu.
Here we have a 10-band equalizer, channel settings (up to 5.1 configuration) and several filters. There are only three of them specifically, of which the “Karaoke” filter will be interesting. It allows you to suppress the voice and leave only a narrow band of frequencies (high ones - the rest are simply cut off :()). Although this approach to suppressing vocals, in my opinion, does not look entirely successful, some may like it.
This menu also duplicates (and somewhat expands) the functionality of the Sound button on the toolbar. We can also choose an audio track to accompany the film, but if there is none in the film itself, then we can connect any external one (if available, of course) in any audio format.
Sometimes it happens that the video sequence does not coincide with the sound track of the film. And if some other players give in to this problem, then SMPlayer can help us. The fact is that we have the opportunity to control the delay of a musical scale by simply pressing the “+” and “-” keys or set the value in milliseconds for the entire film at once (the “Set delay” button).
Connecting subtitles
But where you can really go wild is in the “Subtitles” menu.
We can select and display any “built-in” captions, connect separate external subtitles even for films that do not have them, and control their appearance and display parameters.
As in the case of sound, we can set a delay in displaying subtitles, and if for some reason they are out of sync with the video, you can scroll through them in manual mode using hotkeys (by default “Y” is forward and “G” is backward). We also have the opportunity to search for ready-made subtitles for the current film on one of the best library sites, OpenSubtitles.org.
General SMPlayer settings
And now it’s time to “visit” the “Settings” of the program.
They are not replete with special terms, so everyone can understand them and, accordingly, customize them to suit their needs. All settings are distributed into several points, each of which is responsible for certain parameters. Let's look at some of the sections in more detail.
As mentioned above, SMPlayer has very rich capabilities regarding subtitle settings. Go to the “Subtitles” section.
The first thing to include here is automatic detection language. Otherwise, the subtitles will display some crappy words instead of Russian letters :). If problems arise even after installing autodetection, you can select the encoding manually using the drop-down menu.
Let's see how subtitles are displayed in a movie:
Agree, the standard white color and small size font - it doesn’t look very good. Well, this can be easily fixed. Go to the second tab of the “Subtitles” section - “Font and colors”.
To access advanced settings, click the “Enable SSA/ASS subtitles” button. Now we have the opportunity to fully customize appearance inscriptions on the screen. You can customize text colors, shadows, borders, font selection, subtitle positions, and much more. Once configuration is complete, be sure to apply the changes.
Let's see what we got:
In my opinion this is much better :).
Association with media files
And finally, I would like to draw your attention to how quickly and simply you can associate different types media files from SMPlayer. To do this, in the settings you need to go to the “File Types” section and simply tick the required extensions:
conclusions
Within the framework of this article, only the most characteristic features of SMPlayer are indicated, because the complete detailed description all the functions and capabilities of the program will take more than a dozen pages. You yourself will be able to discover many more useful properties of this player, such as, for example, playing and creating playlists, displaying media file statistics, full customization hotkey management, etc.
If you want to have a simple and handy tool for everyday viewing of videos with subtitles and several audio tracks, then you will probably end up choosing SMPlayer.
P.S. Permission is granted to freely copy and quote this article, provided that an open active link to the source is indicated and the authorship of Ruslan Tertyshny is preserved.
So, we have installed all the necessary drivers and libraries, now we need to install the player and configure everything.
First you need to install it if you don’t already have it installed. For me personally, this player is the only one and there are no others; it is very convenient.
In Ubuntu it is in the official repositories
sudo apt-get install smplayer
Setting up SMPlayer
Settings → Performance → Allow frame drops— turn it off.
Settings → Performance → Decoding streams— set the value equal to the number of cores of your processor.
You can also disable the loop filter, but this will affect the quality:
Settings → Performance → Loop filter → Skip (always).
Disabling double buffering may improve performance but cause subtitles to flicker:
Settings → General → Video → Double buffering
— turn it off.
This alone is enough for smooth playback on computers with a multi-core processor.
But it’s better to use a video card.
Settings → General → Video → Output Device select vdpau.
But as it turned out, for some reason he did not want to show some video files. I remembered that when using vdpau you need to specify some parameters. You need to enter them in the settings, section "Additionally", tab "mplayer/mpv options". in the very first line "Settings:"
Vo vdpau -vc ffmpeg12vdpau,ffh264vdpau,
with a comma at the end. 
As an example, I will show the CPU load using vdpau and without it.
Hardware decoding disabled
Hardware decoding enabled
As we can see, even on a small clip the difference is quite noticeable, and if you include a movie larger than 10GB in size, the difference will be even greater.
That's all, you can safely watch movies with hellish high resolution, and nothing will load or lag :)
SMPlayer is a popular multimedia player for Linux with a nice and simple interface. Almost all video and audio file formats are supported. The program has a lot of useful functions.
SMPlayer supports many features. For example, you can rotate the video 90 degrees while watching it, you can change the video viewing speed, reduce or increase the size, change the aspect ratio of the video, apply various effects, adjust the sound, subtitles, take a screenshot from the video and much more. I really liked the fact that any action happens instantly while watching the video. The program works very quickly.
SMPlayer's interface is simple and convenient. The main window contains two control panels - at the top and bottom and the main menu at the top of the window. Separately, you can enable display of the playlist. It can be placed at the bottom inside the main window, or as a separate window on the screen. Skins (design themes) and icon themes are supported.
One of interesting features The program is that for each file it remembers the position at which you finished viewing it. That is, if, for example, you closed a video file and opened it again the next day, then SMPlayer will start playing from the position where you closed the file last time.
SMPlayer also supports playing and downloading videos from popular services. To do this, use the SMTube utility.
When installing SMPlayer, all the necessary codecs are installed immediately, which is very convenient.
SMPlayer is based on the MPlayer program. In fact, it is an interface for the MPlayer player (frontend shell).
The program is fully translated into Russian and is available for Linux and Windows.
Installing SMPlayer on Ubuntu Linux
SMPlayer can be installed from the repositories using the Ubuntu Application Center. If you want to install the latest version of the program, you can use the PPA repository from the developers. To install SMPlayer from a PPA repository, run the following commands in the terminal:
Sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install smplayer smtube smplayer-themes smplayer-skins
The last command we install is SMPlayer itself, SMTube, as well as a set of skins.
Hi, I don't know much about video player or codecs etc and I'm trying to squeeze the best quality picture out of Mplayer (I'm using the SMplayer interface).
My questions: should I enable post-processing (I don't know what it is, but it looks like it might improve the quality) and direct rendering? (also looks like it might improve the quality) can anyone explain what they do?.
Regarding the output driver, I use vdpau, is this best for cards?
Any other suggestions are welcome.
Thank you.
Using vdpau with Nvidia cards vdpau should give you excellent performance using smplayer and will ensure that you use very little CPU when playing DVDs and x264 encoded videos. As has been discussed in detail on the Ubuntu forums, very important note that
Vdpau is two things. One is a display device such as xv. Another is a codec that can use the PureVideo chip to decode certain files
such as mpeg1/2 and x264. If your card supports it (see here for a list of supported gpus), it's a better option than the old xv , and especially xll , which will use significantly more CPU.
There are some options in smplayer that can be accessed using the configure button next to the vdpau option (see screenshot), but you usually don't have to mess with them unless you have video performance issues.
NOTE. Especially important note that when vdpau codecs are vdpau such as ffh264vdpau , no one from following parameters smplayer gui such as post-processing, deinterlace, etc. will not have any effect. In the screenshot you can also see that "disable filters software" is checked when pressing vdpau properties.
However, as noted in the Mplayer manual, special options such as deint can be passed on the command line when using vdpau, although this is not usually required; these special options are not supported in smplayer gui.
Vdpau (with -vc ffmpeg12vdpau, ffwmv3vdpau, ffvc1vdpau, ffh264vdpau or ffodivxvdpau) Video output that uses VDPAU to decode video via hardware. Also supports displaying of software-decoded video. sharpen=<-1-1>For positive values, apply a sharpening algorithm to the video, for negative values a blurring algorithm (de- fault: 0). denoise=<0-1>Apply a noise reduction algorithm to the video (default: 0, no noise reduction). deint=<0-4>Select the deinterlacer (default: 0). All modes > 0 re- spect -field-dominance.
As shown on this forum,
Deint is an option for the video out (vdpau) not for the codec
and so to specify one of these special options (where vo is the video output and vc is the video codec), you can use the following command (taken from the forum above):
Mplayer -vo vdpau:deint=1 -vc ffh264vdpau 00007.MTS
Thus, when using vdpau you really not You need to worry about these special options or any other settings in the smplayer gui such as post-processing or direct rendering that you usually can't apply when using vdpau .
To contribute to Mick's answer, you can use vdpau in smplayer and enable deinterlacing by adding arguments command line in the SMPlayer settings menu.
Settings > Advanced > Options for MPlayer
In the Options field, add the required command line arguments. For example
SMPlayer is a free open-source multimedia player source code for Linux and Windows, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Unlike other players, it does not require the installation of codecs to play because it has its own required codecs.
This is the first release that supports MPV and some other features such as MPRIS v2 support, new topic, 3D stereo filter and much more. It is also capable of playing almost all known video and audio formats.
One of the most interesting features of SMPlayer is that it remembers the settings of all played files. So, if you start watching a movie, but you need to go somewhere... don't worry, when you open that movie, playback will resume at the same point where you left it, and with the same settings for example, audio track, subtitles, volume. .. SMPlayer can also play very well Youtube video, and includes a handy tool that lets you search for videos on YouTube. This video player comes with multiple icon skins and themes so you can easily change the look of the player. It can search and download subtitles from opensubtitles.org, and is available in more than 30 languages, including Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, etc.
List of features:
- Ability to display two subtitles simultaneously.
- Play videos from video sites such as Youtube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Vevo and many more.
- SMPlayer has better performance than Flashplayer in a web browser, especially on older PCs.
- MKV support.
- Exact search.
- Built-in support for VAAPI and VDA. Improved VDPAU.
- Better screenshot support.
- Filters. Many video and audio filters: deinterlacing, post processing, noise removal... and even a karaoke filter (voice removal).
- Mouse rewind. You can use the mouse wheel to fast forward or rewind in the video. Mouse button customization is also supported.
- The video equalizer allows you to adjust the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation and gamma of the video image.
- Multiple playback speed.
- Sound and subtitles Adjust the delay. Allows you to synchronize audio and subtitles.
- Advanced settings, such as selecting a demultiplexer or video & audio codecs.
- Ability to search and download subtitles from opensubtitles.org.
- Ability to play YouTube videos. YouTube Browser included.
- Translations: SMPlayer is now translated into more than 30 languages, including Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese….
- Ability to change the style and set of interface icons.
- Supports 2 in 1 devices with touch screens
- Ability to display video on external screens
- Free and open source. SMPlayer is distributed under the GPL license.
- New option “Display information on OSD” in View -> OSD View (Shift + I). It displays information about the current file (resolution, bitrate) on the OSD.
- More options for managing the playlist in Settings -> Playlist, what does easier to use playlists for bookmarks.
- Bug fixes and more...
Install SMPlayer 16.11 on Ubuntu 16.04/16.10, Linux mint 18
To install this video player on your system, open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and enter/copy the following commands
Sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer sudo apt update sudo apt install smplayer smtube smplayer-themes smplayer-skins mpv
After installation, find SMPlayer in the application menu and enjoy watching videos.
Do you use this video player? Write what you think about him.