Skipping Ad while playing video using Mplayer

To skip Advertisements/unwanted scenes, or to mute certain parts of a movie, the Edit Decision Lists (EDL) are very helpful.

Please read the following link for more details:-
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/edl.html

Playing only Audio from a Video File

If you want to play only audio from a video file (say xyz.avi),
please provide -vo null in mplayer, given as:

$ mplayer -vo null xyz.avi


Joining Multiple Videos into One Using Mplayer

In order to join multiple video files, into a single video file, you just need to issue following command:

$ mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o joined_single_video.avi video1.avi video2.avi video3.avi

Even you can use wild cards (*, ?) too.

$ mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o joined_single_video.avi video*.avi

PS. In place of 'avi', you can give whatever file format is available.

Playing Directory in Mplayer

In order to play media files inside a directory with mplayer, I have written a shell script. Please save it in a directory in your $PATH variable.

For example, ~/bin/mplayer_dir.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Plays files inside a directory with mplayer

playlist="/home/mitesh/.mplayer/playlist.txt"

dir="./"
if [[ $# > 0 ]]
then
dir=$1
fi

#rm -f $playlist
find "$dir" -iname "*" | egrep -i "\.(wma|wmv|flv|mp3|avi|vob|dat|mp4|m4v|ogg|divx|xvid|rmvb|rm|asf)$" | sort > $playlist
#cat $playlist
nlines=`wc -l $playlist | awk '{print $1}'`

if [[ $nlines > 0 ]]
then
mplayer -playlist $playlist
else
echo "$0: Unrecognized files in $dir"
echo "Please update this script if playable format is present."

fi

--------------

Sample Run:

$ mplayer_dir.sh [directory]

How to Download mms:// (MultiMedia Stream) Video?

If you are not able to download the mms://a-web-site/stream_video.wmv
and only able to play via streaming. But you might have slow speed,

Then, you can use mencoder to download above file.

$ mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o out_video_file.wmv mms://a-web-site/stream_video.wmv

PS. If you want to view via streaming, you can use mplayer:

$ mplayer mms://a-web-site/stream_video.wmv