Archives For November 30, 1999

SMPlayer Ubuntu

SMPlayer, a graphical user interface (GUI) for the award-winning MPlayer, has reached release 14.3.0. This tutorial will show you how to install or upgrade to the latest SMPlayer in Ubuntu while the default Ubuntu repositories still have version 0.8.x.

Changes in SMPlayer 14.3:

  • The control for fullscreen mode has been rewritten and improved. Now it is displayed over the video.
  • (Windows) New option in Preferences -> Subtitles to enable or disable the use of the Windows font directory. Disabling this option prevents the annoying font scanning.
  • Some presets have been added to the audio equalizer.
  • (Experimental) Possibility to play (non-protected) blu-ray discs.
  • Better support for multimedia keys. This can help control SMPlayer with a remote control.
  • New option in the playlist preferences for adding automatically other files in the folder to the playlist.
  • The option “Move the window when the video area is dragged” has been fixed.
  • (Windows) Now it’s possible to open Windows shortcuts (symlinks).
  • Better support for Youtube.
  • (Windows) Better screensaver disabling.
  • Many bugfixes.
  • Possibility to compile with Qt 5.

Install SMPlayer:

Ubuntu users are recommended to get the latest SMPlayer from PPA. To do so, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run the commands below one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer 

sudo apt-get update 

sudo apt-get install smplayer smtube smplayer-themes smplayer-skins

So far, the PPA supports Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.10, Ubuntu 12.04 and their derivatives, such as Linux Mint, Elementary OS Luna, and etc.

SMPlayer 0.8.6 has been released with Youtube Playback fixed. With this tutorial, you can always install the latest SMPlayer in Ubuntu & Linux Mint via SMPlayere PPA.

Changes in latest SMPlayer 0.8.6:

  • SMPlayer can now update its internal Youtube code so it’s not necessary to update smplayer everytime Youtube makes a change.
  • A section “Updates” has been added to the preferences dialog, where it’s possible to configure or disable the update checker.
  • SMPlayer could still fail to find some subtitles from opensubtitles.org. Hopefully this is fixed.
  • (Windows) The autoload of subtitles with non latin1 filenames has been fixed.
  • The Windows installer gives the possibility to delete most of the configuration files of smplayer. This can be useful if the configuration files have been corrupted or smplayer has been misconfigured. Linux users can use the command “smplayer -delete-config”.
  • Several other bugfixes. See the Changelog for details.
  • Install SMPlayer via PPA:

    So far, the PPA supports Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10, Ubuntu 12.04, and Linux Mint 13, 14, 15, 16.

    Press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal. When it opens, run commands to add SMPlayer PPA.

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer

    Then update and install the media player:

    sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install smplayer