Framebuffer

Unter Debian müssen die User in der Gruppe "Video" sein, um das Framebuffer-Device benutzen zu können.

Now, depending on your setup, you may or or may not notice a problem here. First of all, your videos may not play at all. And, if they do, you may find that your videos are displaying at an incredibly small size, use the following command to fix this

mplayer -vo fbdev -vop scale=1280:1024 -ao alsa

This command use the -vo switch which specifies the video output drivers to be used. -vop is a switch that allows you to set the resolution. Adjust the value to pass in your own screen resolution. I threw the last -ao switch in for good measure (although it's not required) to force mplayer to use the ALSA sound drivers.

MPlayer has the ability, when using the -vo argument, to loop through the options you pass it until it finds one that works. This comes in handy when you save those options to your mplayer configuration file, which will be saved in your home directory, under the .mplayer directory.

As an example, assume that when running in X, mplayer should use xv as the vo device, but when running in console mode, it should use svga. You can see a list of your other video out options by running mplayer -vo help.

To have mplayer cycle through specific vo options, add this line to ~/.mplayer/config

vo=xv,svga

List each video out option seperated by commmas. Now you won't need to pass -vo when running mplayer.

One thing worth noting, is that if neither xv nor svga works, mplayer will still advance to its next vo option. If you compiled mplayer with support for gif, png or jpeg, it will try these next, outputting your video to image files.

You can add "null" to the end of the vo list, which will always succeed, if you don't want it to output image files.

This example also uses x11 as a video out device if xv doesn't work for some reason:

vo=xv,x11,svga,null