Between Linux and Anime

Kind of like Schrodinger's Cat

Smplayer UI hanging after update in OpenSUSE?

Just gonna pen a quick note. Smplayer, the pretty great Qt-based frontend for mplayer that I use, started behaving strangely after I performed a recent software update. Symptoms are – video plays, but does not respond to common keyboard commands like ‘f’ to full-screen and arrow keys to skip. Also, the GUI becomes unresponsive – you can’t click anything. I didn’t spend too much time looking up the source of the problem, but it may be related to this.

I’ve discovered you can workaround this annoying problem by installing mplayer2 and then configuring smplayer to use that instead of mplayer. Simply install mplayer2 via yast or via

sudo zypper install mplayer2

Then start smplayer (without arguments! If you load it with a video the UI will freeze!) and go to Options > Preferences > General > General and key in “mplayer2” for the field “Mplayer executable:

While there are some differences between mplayer2 and mplayer, everything appears to work fine using it with smplayer so far, so I’m pretty happy.

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4 Comments

  1. I use smplayer (and by extension mplayer)and I have never really had any problems with the gui.

    Probably because I am on Arch Linux or I am using GTK.

    In any case this mplayer2 thing looks intersting. Especially the fact that it uses libass by default.

  2. Jason "moofang"

    I’ve never had issues until now either. But then there’s the claim there that the latest version of mplayer doesn’t work with a few frontends, and my mplayer version fits the offending one, so it might be a temporary incompatibility problem that I expect will get fixed soon.

    Still, it’s nice to know you can stick an alternative backend player into smplayer :)

  3. Jonathan Dlouhy

    Thanks for this little fix. I’m using SmPlayer on openSUSE 13.2 and it would just crash with an error code 1. Now I switched it mplayer 2 and it works. I’m glad, because this is one of the few players that will remember video positions. Unlike VLC. :-(.

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