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Tips and tricks

Unleash the full power of MPlayer, and customize to your hearts need, using these helpful tricks, some are from this wiki

Video scaling
If you watch a lot of dvd videos, you are probably not satisfied with the resolution and would like to upscale the source. MPlayer can do it! The filter I use looks like this:
-vf scale=-3:1050 -sws 9
This upscales the video using the lanczos filter, until the height is 1050px. If your monitor has 1920 × 1080 pixel you can use use:
-vf scale=-3:1080 -sws 9 
Hope you too can notice the difference between OSX hardware scaler and mplayer's software upscaler.

Downmixing DTS 5.1 audio to 2-channels
Alot of files come with DTS audio. if you are like me and prefer to watch videos with a good pair of headphones, you need to downmix the audio properly. Basing my calculations on this forum discussion I ended up using this filter:
-channels 6 -af pan=2:.67:.33:.33:.67:.89:.11:.11:.89:.89:.89:.89:.89

Play a section of a video
To play a section of a file use -endpos and -ss.-endpos is relative to ss. so -ss 00:00:30 -endpos 00:00:10 would start at 00:00:30 and end at 00:00:40.

Using the command line MPlayer
To use the command line version of mplayer without any hussle, we suggest you create a link to the binary file contained in the MPlayer OSX.app bundle. To do that, just type the following into your terminal:
ln -s "/Applications/MPlayer OSX Extended.app/Contents/Resources/Binaries/mpextended.mpBinaries/Contents/MacOS/mplayer" /usr/local/bin/mplayer
This will create a symlink to the mplayer command line binary, and place it into /usr/local/bin. (You can place it anywhere you like, but traditionally, user made binaries, that are not part of the distribution are placed in /usr/local/bin)

MPlayer configuration file
MPlayer OSX Extended uses an different configuration file than the one in "~/.mplayer/config" to avoid conflicts.

Place your config file in "~/Library/Application Support/MPlayer OSX Extended/MPlayer/" instead. See the MPlayer man page for details on the syntax and the available options.