Xvid is a free software MPEG-4 ASP compliant video codec. Note that Xvid is not necessary to decode Xvid-encoded video. libavcodec is used by default as it offers better speed.

x264 is a library for creating H.264 video. MPlayer sources are updated whenever an x264 API change occurs, so it is always suggested to use MPlayer from Subversion.

If you have a GIT client installed, the latest x264 sources can be gotten with this command:

git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git

Then build and install in the standard way:

./configure && make && make install

Now rerun ./configure for MPlayer to pick up x264 support.

An open source AAC decoder called FAAD2 is available from http://www.audiocoding.com/downloads.html. MPlayer includes a copy of it in its source tree. If you want to use the external library instead, install it and pass --enable-faad-external to ./configure.

FAAD2 binaries are not available from audiocoding.com, but you can (apt-)get Debian packages from Christian Marillat, Mandrake/Mandriva RPMs from the P.L.F and Fedora/CentOS/RHEL RPMs from RPMFusion.

If you choose to build from source, you do not need all of FAAD2 to decode AAC files, libfaad is enough. Build it like this:

cd faad2/
sh bootstrap
./configure
cd libfaad
make
make install

Adaptive Multi-Rate speech codec is used in third generation (3G) mobile phones. Reference implementation is available from The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (free for private use). To enable support, download and install support libraries for AMR-NB and AMR-WB following the instructions on that page. Recompile MPlayer afterwards.

MPlayer can use XMMS input plugins to play many file formats. There are plugins for SNES game tunes, SID tunes (from Commodore 64), many Amiga formats, .xm, .it, VQF, Musepack, Bonk, shorten and many others. You can find them at the XMMS input plugin page.

For this feature you need to have XMMS and compile MPlayer with ./configure --enable-xmms.