A new very interesting feature, thanks to the newly added support for mpv, is the possibility to play videos from many video sites. Youtube was already supported, but now you can play videos from DailyMotion, Vimeo, Vevo and many more sites, just by entering the URL of the video in SMPlayer. Performance is much better in SMPlayer (or any other player) than using the flashplayer in a web browser.

You’ll need:

• SMPlayer from SVN
• mpv 0.7.0 or greater
• the very latest version of youtube-dl
  

Configuration:

You need to enable the option “Play video from streaming sites” in Preferences -> Network.

After that you only have to enter the URL of the video you want to play in Open -> URL. The video will be played by mpv, which will use youtube-dl to get the real address of the video.

Youtube-dl supports a lot of sites. You can get a list here: http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html

SMPlayer already had support for Youtube, so the Youtube URLs will still be handled by SMPlayer. However it’s possible to disable SMPlayer’s internal support for Youtube. In this case the Youtube URLs will be passed directly to mpv, which actually provides an interesting feature: subtitles are available.

The following requires SMPlayer from SVN + mpv 0.7.0 + youtube-dl.

Visit http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/mpv to know how to get them. Windows users only need to download the package from that page, everything is included in the package.

Now you have to make this adjustments in the SMPlayer configuration. In Preferences -> Network, disable the option to use the internal support for Youtube, and enable the option to play videos from streaming sites:

Now go to Advanced -> Options for MPlayer/MPV and enter

--ytdl-format=bestvideo+bestaudio

That’s all.

There’s a little problem, in this mode the reported duration of the video is wrong.

Now it’s not necessary anymore to use a special installer to install SMPlayer with mpv. The regular installer gives the possibility to install either mplayer or mpv.

Just click on “Playback components” and select mpv. An mpv build will be downloaded from the internet, so you need an internet connection to perform the installation.

If you don’t know what mpv is, please read this previous article:
SMPlayer with support for MPV is now available/

SMPlayer now supports mpv, which brings new interesting features. Click here to know more.

This article explains how to get the latest version of SMPlayer and mpv in Ubuntu.

To get the latest version of SMPlayer, just update it from the official PPA, open a terminal and enter these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer 
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install smplayer

To get the latest mpv, you can use this PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~mc3man/+archive/ubuntu/mpv-tests
It contains packages for Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10.

Type these commands to add the repository and install mpv:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mc3man/mpv-tests
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install mpv

Finally, to use mpv instead of mplayer in SMPlayer, open the SMPlayer preferences dialog, and replace “mplayer” with “mpv” in the mplayer executable field:

That’s all.

It’s possible to play torrents directly in SMPlayer, no need to download the torrent first!

You need to install peerflix. This is a video streaming BitTorrent client. It starts to download the torrent (to a temp folder) and streams the video. Then SMPlayer (or any other player) can play the stream.

You can install peerflix in Ubuntu with these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo npm install -g peerflix

Now to play a movie with SMPlayer run this command:

peerflix http://some-torrent/movie.torrent -g -d

For more info about the command line options type:

peerflix --help

More info about peerflix and how to use it with other players:
http://www.webupd8.org/2014/03/peerflix-stream-torrents-with-vlc-or.html

Due to changes in YouTube, the old SMTube doesn’t work anymore. A new version has been developed, written from scratch. You can download it from http://smtube.sourceforge.net

But now people are asking “is possible to download videos with this new version?”
Short answer: yes, but you have to configure it. Please, continue reading.

The new SMTube uses the YouTube API v.3. In order to use this API it’s necessary to ask Google for a “developer key”. And you have to accept their terms of use. Those terms of use don’t allow to implement applications to download videos. So I can’t add any function to download videos from YouTube.

But this new version includes a configuration dialog that allows you to add more media players (VLC, Windows Media Player…). Actually you can add any kind of application, you are not limited to media players. You can add a download manager… in this case the video won’t be played, it will be downloaded…

Now I’m going to give you an example. I’m going to use uget. This is free download manager with versions for both Linux and Windows.

In SMTube select View -> Settings. And add a new player.

The configuration, for Linux, is the following:

Name: uget
Executable: uget-gtk
Parameters: --quiet --folder=/tmp --filename=%f %u 
This player supports video sites: unchecked

Configuration for Windows:

Name: uget
Executable: C:/Users/<user>/uget/bin/uget.exe
Parameters: --filename=%f %u
This player supports video sites: unchecked

That’s it. Now in SMTube, right click on a video and select uget. The video will be downloaded.

Another example, to call youtube-dl (Linux):

Name: youtube-dl
Executable: xterm
Parameters: -e youtube-dl %u -f 22 -o "/tmp/%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s"
This player supports video sites: checked

That would save the videos in 720p quality (option -f 22) in the /tmp folder.

Configuration for Windows:

Name: youtube-dl
Executable: mplayer\youtube-dl.exe
Parameters: %u -f 22 -o "C:\Users\<user>\Videos\Youtube\%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s"
This player supports video sites: checked

And the final example. Using wget (Linux):

Name: wget
Executable: xterm
Parameters: -e wget -O /tmp/%f %u
This player supports video sites: unchecked

(This would save the videos in /tmp)

Due to changes in YouTube, the old SMTube doesn’t work anymore. A new version has been developed, written from scratch. You can download it from http://smtube.sourceforge.net

For the moment only basic functionality is included: search and browse categories. But new features will be added in the future.

In this new version you can choose which media player to use to play the YouTube videos. And you can add more in the settings dialogs. This is an explanation of the data you have to enter to edit or add a player:

Name: this is the name that will be displayed in the context menu: “Open with <name>”
Executable: the binary name (a full path is allow) that should be run. For example: mplayer or /usr/bin/mplayer or mplayer.exe (Windows).
Parameters: the parameters that should be passed to the application. There are some special characters that SMTube will replace:

• %u (the URL of the video)
• %t (the title of the video)
• %f (a string that can be used as output filename, usually it’s the title + mp4 extension)

%t and %f should only be used when the option “this player supports videos sites” is NOT checked. (See below)

Example: –title=%t –file=%f %u would expand to something like: –title=”Funny video” –file=”Funny video.mp4″ http://……..

This player supports videos sites: can be checked or unchecked. If it’s checked this means that the player is smart enough to find out the video URL from the YouTube page. When checked SMTube just passes (with %u) the URL of the YouTube page, it’s up to the player to find out the real address of the video. If the option is not checked then SMTube will find out the URL of the video and pass it to the player. For example, SMPlayer, mpv+youtube-dl and VLC can find out the URL of the video, so this option should be checked for them. On the other hand mplayer doesn’t support YouTube so you have to leave this option unchecked.

Notice that due to the terms of use of the YouTube API, this version doesn’t include any option to download videos. But you can read this article to find out how to add it:

How to download videos with the new SMTube

Last Thursday, July 16th, SourceForge suffered an outage due a storage fault. 5 days later the problem is not fixed yet. They restored some services but the project web is still offline. People trying to visit smplayer.sourceforge.net will get this screen:

So they aren’t able to download SMPlayer from the official website. The downloads from fosshub.com (where the stable packages for Windows are stored) have dropped to almost 0.

So to try to prevent this to happen again in the future, I think the best would be to host the SMPlayer website outside of SourceForge. Actually it already has been uploaded to smplayer.es.

This blog, the forum, the SVN repository, the stable downloads are already outside of SourceForge.

The Windows installer package includes a MPlayer build but in order to save space it doesn’t include the mpv build. When the user selects to install mpv it is downloaded from http://mpv.srsfckn.biz which seems to be the official site for the mpv builds for Windows.

But now suprisingly, mpv.srsfckn.biz seems to detect the SMPlayer installer and in that case it serves a fake mpv package, which is only 6 KB. When SMPlayer tries to run mpv.exe from it, it fails with this message:

The mpv team strongly discourages the use of SMPlayer due to its half-baked
integration and the developers' continued ignorance and refusal to use the
proper, supported way to handle mpv integration:

- Use libmpv
- Stop treating it like MPlayer (mpv is fundamentally different now)
- Change the UI to accomodate mpv's differences (many options have changed
semantics, features have been added/changed/removed, etc.)

It is not feasible to offer the same level of support for all three members
of the MPlayer family in a single frontend. Hence, SMPlayer ought to pick
one of them and implement proper support for it.
Right now, SMPlayer only has complete support for MPlayer.

You are seeing this message because the SMPlayer developers refuse to make
the state of SMPlayer's mpv "support" clear to its users, despite how broken
and incomplete it is.

If you are looking for an alternative to SMPlayer, try one of these:

- Use mpv without a frontend. It's probably not as bad as you think!

https://mpv.srsfckn.biz

- Baka MPlayer

http://bakamplayer.u8sand.net

The problem is fixed in svn r7051. Now the Windows installer will download the real mpv from the SMPlayer site instead.

Regarding that text in the fake mpv I’d like to say the following:

1. I added support for mpv because many people asked for it.
2. SMPlayer is mainly a MPlayer front-end so supporting mpv the way its developers seem to want is not possible. Consider the mpv support an add-on.
3. Anyway I think the support for mpv in SMPlayer is pretty complete. Most (all?) menu options work. There is even support for specific features of mpv (like the secondary subtitle track or precise seek). If something doesn’t work as expected is probably due to changes between versions of mpv (they don’t care about backward compatibility).
4. If they don’t like SMPlayer, why don’t they implement their own GUI -the way they like- instead of trying to boycott SMPlayer?
5. I have no time for nonsense. If they don’t want SMPlayer to support mpv then I’ll probably stop supporting it.

SMPlayer includes now an option to convert 3D formats: Video -> Stereo 3D filter.

In the Stereo 3D filter dialog you need to select the input and output formats.

Let’s see an example:

In this YouTube video the format is side by side with half resolution.

So we select that option as input format. As output format you can for example select anaglyph red/cyan color, which allows you to watch the video in 3D with red/cyan glasses.

There are many outputs available. The “mono output” allows to watch the video without 3D.

Another example:

In this video the format is above-below half resolution.

Result with the anaglyph red/cyan output:

If you try to play a YouTube live stream with SMPlayer you’ll probably get the error “unable to locate the URL of the video”. This happens because the SMPlayer internal support for YouTube can’t handle live streams. However it’s still possible to play live streams by using SMPlayer with mpv+youtube-dl.

First, you need to install SMPlayer with mpv. This is explained here:
http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/mpv.php

Then you have to make a change in the configuration. Go to Preferences -> Network and turn off the option “Enable YouTube internal support” and turn on “Enable mpv’s support for streaming sites”.

Now the YouTube live streams can be played with SMPlayer. If you want to test it, here’s a live stream (Sky News): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y60wDzZt8yg

There’s a downside: with mpv+youtube-dl online streams take much more time to start to play.

In this new version we fixed again the code to support VEVO videos.

This version also adds support for YouTube live streams (an example of live stream: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfaVDgd17Io).

Notice however that you’ll probably need to play these live streams with mpv since mplayer has trouble to play this kind of videos.

SMTube website: www.smtube.org

The new version 15.11 is available for download. The main reason for this release is to fix the YouTube code which got broken again.

Besides of that, there are also a few other interesting changes:

• We added support for YouTube live streams (more info)
• The thumbnail generator is much faster (up to 2x faster than before)

Other changes:

• New options to seek to the previous or next subtitle (mpv only).
• New option to select the image format for the screenshots (mpv only).
• Fix a crash when changing the GUI.
• New option that allows to center the window automatically.
• A tooltip is now displayed in the time slider with the corresponding time of the mouse position.
• (Find subtitles) New option to specify if the language code should be appended to the subtitle filename.
• (Windows) The main window will be centered if it’s partially outside of the desktop after an auto resize.
• When adding files to the playlist the first item is moved to its correct place in the list.
• (Experimental) New action to start/stop capturing the playback stream.

Download SMPlayer 15.11

Version 16.1 is available for download. In this version YouTube has been fixed again.

There’s another fix, now the screenshots work again with older versions of MPlayer or mpv.

Version 16.1 also includes a new feature. Now it’s possible to set bookmarks on a video (for example in a musical movie you can mark the beginning of each song, to quickly seek to them later).

This feature is available in the menu Browser -> Bookmarks. You’ll find there an option to add a new bookmark, an option to edit the current bookmarks and the bookmarks you had set.

There are some key shortcuts:

• Ctrl+A: adds a new bookmark
• Ctrl+B: seeks to the previous bookmark
• Ctrl+N: seeks to the next bookmark

Notice that currently bookmarks only work with “regular” files (so no discs or online streams) and the option to “remember the settings for all files” (Preferences -> General) must be enabled.

Download SMPlayer 16.1

From version 16.3 download YouTube videos with smtube is easier than ever. Now you don’t need to install a download manager and configure smtube to use it. All you need to do is enable an option in the settings.

Now when you click in the “more info” button, you’ll find a “download” button:

When you click in this button smtube will open an external website which allows to download the video. It’s possible to configure which website to use in the smtube settings, there are several available and you can add your own.

You can use %YT_URL% which gets replaced with the YouTube URL and %YT_ID% which is replaced by the video ID. Example: http://savemedia.com/watch?v=%YT_ID%

The upcoming version will have new interesting features and you can test it now. Links at the bottom of the page.

Some of the features require Qt 5. The Windows version has been built with Qt 5.6.

Support for high DPI screens.

On these screens SMPlayer (and many other applications) looked very tiny. In the new version the interface is scaled so it looks good.
This feature requires at least Qt 5.4.

Support for 2 in 1 computers with touch screen.

SMPlayer includes now a “tablet mode” (available in the Options menu). When the option is turned on it makes some changes in the GUI so that it would be easy to control SMPlayer by touching the screen.

• the font size and buttons are increased
• some of the options in the menus are hidden
• sliding vertically in the video changes the volume, sliding horizontally seeks in the video
• tapping while in fullscreen displays the floating control

When the user changes the tablet mode in the Windows action center, SMPlayer will detect it and ask if it should switch to the SMPlayer’s tablet mode as well.

This feature has only been tested on Windows 10, however I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work on Linux as well.

Support for dual screen

Now it’s possible to send the video to a second screen connected to the computer, while controlling the application in the computer’s screen.

Note: the desktop must be configured as “extended”.

There’s a new option in the Video menu: send video to screen. It shows a submenu with all detected screens.
One of the screens is labeled as “primary screen”, which is the computer’s screen. If you send the video to another screen the video will be displayed on that screen in fullscreen mode. The SMPlayer interface will remain in the computer’s screen (it won’t display the video) where you can control the video (seek, change volume, subtitles, playlist, open another video…) while the video is displayed on the second screen. If you send the video to the primary screen the video will be re-attached to the SMPlayer window.

This option has only been tested on Windows 10.

Global shortkeys

Now it’s possible to use the media keys (play/pause, stop, volume+/-, etc.) as global shortcuts. That means that those keys will work even when SMPlayer is in the background. You can activate this option in Preferences -> Keyboard and mouse.
This option requires Qt 5.

Settings are remembered for online streams too

This means that for example you can add bookmarks to YouTube videos or other online streams (as long as they are seekable).

Testers for these new features are very welcome. If you find any problem, please let me know.

Download:

Version for Windows:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/smplayer/files/Unstable/

Packages for Ubuntu (smplayer r7834):
https://launchpad.net/~rvm/+archive/ubuntu/testing/+packages
(the package for Ubuntu precise is built with Qt 4)

Packages for Debian 8, Fedora and OpenSUSE (smplayer r7864):
https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3Asmplayerdev%3Atests&package=smplayer

Since version 16.6 the SMPlayer packages are built with Qt 5 by default.

However some users don’t like Qt 5 (for example the file open dialog is different) or there are bugs (for example in some versions of Qt 5 the numeric keypad keys don’t work as accelerators). For that reason now there’s available another PPA for Ubuntu with packages compiled with Qt 4.

https://launchpad.net/~rvm/+archive/ubuntu/smplayer-qt4

To install packages from that PPA, first remove the normal PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:rvm/smplayer

Add the new one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer-qt4

Update and install:

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

In the new version 16.8 the playlist has finally been improved.

Now it’s possible to sort by any column.There’s also a new column, which displays the path of the file (or URL). The good thing is this allows you to sort the list by folder name.

It’s also possible to search in the playlist. When you type something in the search field the playlist will display only the items that match the search string. Notice that the search is performed in all columns.

And finally there’s a new option to load a playlist from internet. This will download the playlist from the URL you enter. As example you can enter this URL: http://smplayer.info/onlinetv.php. This URL provides a playlist with some online TV streams.

The playlist includes some music channels and some online TV channels from Spain. Notice that the Spanish channels may be geolocated and thus they may only play within Spain.

La versión 16.8 de SMPlayer trae varias mejoras en la lista de reproducción. Una de ellas es que ahora es posible descargar una lista desde una URL. Además hemos creado, a modo de ejemplo, una lista con muchos de los canales TDT españoles. En este artículo se explica cómo cargar esa lista.

Para ello hay que abrir la lista de reproducción (en el menú Ver). Después hay que hacer clic en el botón de “abrir URL”:

En la nueva ventana tecleamos esta URL: http://smplayer.info/onlinetv.php

Esperamos unos segundos y se descargará una lista con varios canales online:

Para ver cualquier canal sólo hay que hacer doble clic sobre él.

Unas notas:

• No todos los canales emiten las 24h del día por lo que es posible que al tratar de ver alguno dé error.
• Los enlaces de Mediaset (Telecinco, Cuatro, etc.) caducan a los pocos minutos. Si al tratar de ver uno de esos canales da error, vuelve a recargar la lista para que se actualicen los enlaces. Además cuando alguno de los canales de mediaset no emite online, el canal no aparecerá en la lista.
• Los canales incluyen en el nombre una serie de etiquetas (ES, SPORT, etc) para hacer más fácil la búsqueda en la lista. Si no te gusta que aparezcan esas etiquetas, usa esta URL para cargar la lista: http://smplayer.info/onlinetv.php?tags=0

This version has the following main changes:

Send audio to device

In version 16.6 one featured option was the possibility to send the video to an external screen. Now, in version 16.9 there’s the new option to send the audio to the specified audio device. It can be useful to send the audio to a TV via a HDMI cable or a bluetooth device.

Improvements on the playlist

Now it’s possible to hide any column (right click to see the options). The search field is also hidden by default, a new search button shows/hides it. These changes are intended to prevent the playlist window to be too wide.

Returning to Qt 4 on Linux

Since version 16.6 SMPlayer is built with Qt 5 by default. However many linux users complained about some problems with Qt 5.These are some of them:

• the numeric keypad keys won’t work as shortcuts
• Qt 5 uses its own file open dialog instead of the native one
• the systray icon is not displayed in the systray but in the top left corner of the screen

So I think for the moment it’s better to return to Qt 4 until Qt 5 had those issues fixed. For that reason now the Ubuntu packages are compiled with Qt 4 again.