GTK MediaplayEr foR LINux

2 Usage

2.1 Invoking Gmerlin

Gmerlin has some commandline options for loading plugins. They are VERY expertimental and buggy so I don't want to document them here. They will officially appear in a future version. In the meantime, call gmerlin by:
gmerlin file1.wav file2.avi ...
where file1.wav and file2.avi are media files supported by gmerlin. Unsupported files are ignored.

2.2 Loading media files

If you invoke gmerlin, you can use commandline options (see above). If Gmerlin is already running, you can add files to the playlist by dropping them onto the playlist window or by selecting "Add File(s)" in the playlist menu. In the file open dialog, you can optionally select a plugin, with should be used. You can use this, if your file doesn't have a suffix, which is recognized by gmerlin or if multiple plugins support one file type (e.g. i_gmerlin_mpeg and i_mpeg for mp3s).
Use the next and previous buttons to select the track you want to hear/see. Or simply double click on the track.

2.3 Playing Audio CDs

Go to Options->Preferences in the menu of the main window. Here you can select the input plugin. There are 2 audio CD plugins:
CD Player and CD Reader. The CD Player just sends some commands to your CD-Drive to control playback. The audio data are sent directly to the soundcard, so the CPU-Usage is minimal.

If you want to save CD tracks to audio files, select the CD Reader plugin, and an appropriate audio output plugin for writing WAVs or encoding MP3s or Ogg Vorbis files.

The selection of the input plugins will (hopefully) become much easier in the future, when the playlist supports folders and subfolders.

2.4 Converting Formats

Gmerlin has file writer plugins, which try to save anything, which comes from the input, to media files. Go to Options->Preferences in the main window menu. Go to Audio Output and Video Output to select the audio and video output plugins. Pressing the Configure button shows a configuration window where you can select subformats, codecs, quality levels and so on.
If the video output plugin also supports audio, you can select "Use this for audio" to write audio and video to the same file. The audio output plugin isn't used in this case.

In the Main precerences window, you can chose an output directory for file writer plugins. You can also select, if output files should be deleted, if the conversion is interrupted (by the stop button or so). The filename of the ouput file is the name which appears in the playlist plus a format specific suffix. If you want a different name for the file, you can change the trackname in the playlist.

2.5 Playing DVD's

Gmerlin has no DVD plugin yet. You can, however, load the corresponding .ifo file from the "video_ts"-Directory of the mounted DVD. The file is treated just as every other media file.

2.6 Improving video performance

Gmerlin can use XShm and XVideo for video playback in an X11 window. XShm is currently needed for Video playback and should be available if the XServer and Gmerlin run on the same machine. It just means, that XServer and gmerlin use the same memory for the video frames, which reduces traffic through the X connection.

XVideo is new in XFree86-4. It provides hardware scaling (for fullscreen mode) and can show frames in various VUY formats, which come out of many kinds of media files. With XVideo,  gmerlin bypasses software YUV->RGB conversion, which significatly improves performance. YUV frames also use less memory (YUV4:2:0 is 50% of 24 bit RGB), so using XVideo reduces the data traffic to your graphics card.

To play video, which is available in YUV-formats supported by your graphics card, using the xvideo extension, enable "Check for XVideo" in the configuration dialog of the X11 output plugin. If you enable "Force XVideo",  XVideo is also used (if supported by hardware/driver) for input plugins, which produce only RGB frames. In this case, gmerlin does software RGB->YUV conversion. "Force XVideo" can be enabled on machines which are fast enough for the RGB->YUV conversion. This provides hardware scaling for all types of media files you watch.