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Solving Problems

Having problems with something? Read on, and you may find the answer here

How do i get ordered chapters and/or 10bit encoding working?
Use the mplayer2 bundle by Stefano Pigozzi: A binary bundle of the mplayer2 fork with added support for e.g. ordered chapters and 10bit encoding.
How do I make the video not skip when changing the volume, when the video is paused?
Use the mplayer2 bundle by Stefano Pigozzi.

How do i get subtitles working?
MPlayer has excellent support for subtitles. It can decode and use almost any format of subtitles there is. And getting them to work, is as easy as downloading the right font package. In order to obtain the font package, point your favorite browser to the MPlayer download page, and download the font package that is right for you. (they differ in the encoding used, more on that later). After downloading the font package, open it in the Finder. (if you have StuffIT Expander installed, it should unpack automatically). You should now have a folder containing the fonts in different sizes. Now, you need to move the subtitle folder of the right size, to the MPlayer application. To do this, just ctrl-click on the MPlayer OSX package, and choose "Show package contents". Now got to "Contents" -> "Resources" -> "Fonts", and drag and drop the subtitle folder here. Now just restart MPlayer OSX, go to preferences, and choose the font you just installed to be used for subtitles

Which encoding is right for me?
In order for subtitles to display correctly, you need to be using the right encoding for your font package.
  • Western (ISO 8859-1): Use this encoding if you are going to use only english subtitles, that do not contain any non-standard characters
  • Central European (ISO 8859-2): Use this encoding if you use Slovak, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, etc...subtitles. But you must make sure, that the subtitles are actually encoded using this codepage, otherwise the diacritics will not display correctly
  • Central European (CP1250): This is the encoding that you should use, if you use Slovak, Czech, or other Central European language subtitle file. CP1250 is a windows version of the ISO-8859-2 encoding scheme, and 99% of subtitle files are encoded using this encoding scheme. This is the recommended encoding to use for your font package
  • Greek (ISO 8859-7): For cyrilic, and similar text subtitle files

The subtitles work when I use the GUI, but not when I run MPlayer from the command line. How come?
The reason is simple: MPlayer cannot find the right font to use. You need to copy the folder containing the font of the size and encoding you want (see "How do I get subtitles working") into ~/.mplayer/font.
E.g. mv ~/Desktop/font-arial-cp1250/font-arial-18-cp1250/ ~/.mplayer/font

Help, seeking does not work
The most probable cause of this is a missing index. Each movie file has an index, either at the beginning or the end of the file (depending on the format of the movie), which stores metadata used for seeking. If you cannot seek in the movie you are watching, it most likely means, that the index is missing, or the movie file is in some way corrupted. But do not fear, fixing this in MPlayer is a snap...

You need to run mplayer from the command line (see Tips and tricks), and you need to specify the option -idx or -forceidx. This will cause the index to be rebuilt, allowing you to seek in the movie.