Now available for download for all Linux distros

Jan 25, 2016 01:20 GMT  ·  By

It's been a while since we last heard from the developers of the most prominent open-source video player software in the GNU/Linux ecosystem, MPlayer, which has reached version 1.2.1 today.

According to the release notes, MPlayer 1.2.1 is the first maintenance build of the 1.2 series, which was announced back in October 2015 after three long years of development.

MPlayer 1.2.1 is here to fix some of the most annoying issues reported by users since the previous release, such as several crashes with fuzzed files and compatibility enhancement related bugs.

"MPlayer 1.2.1 is a bugfix release from the 1.2 branch. If you're using MPlayer 1.2 you are encouraged to upgrade. MPlayer 1.2.1 fixes many crashes with fuzzed files, squashes many bugs and includes some compatibility enhancements," said the devs.

One of the most interesting aspects of the MPlayer 1.2.1 release is support for the FFMpeg 2.8 "Feynman" open-source multimedia framework, especially the 2.8.5 maintenance release that patches a nasty security issue.

We reported on this last month, but we'll take this opportunity to remind everyone that FFmpeg 2.8.4 and previous versions are affected by a security flaw that could allow an attacker to steal your files remotely by crafting a malicious video file.

FFmpeg 3.0 not yet supported

So most probably, this is one of the main reasons for today's maintenance release of MPlayer 1.2, which, however, does not yet offer support for the master branch of FFmpeg, nor for the upcoming FFmpeg 2.9 or 3.0 release.

However, the MPlayer developers inform us that it's now a lot easier to build the 1.2.1 release with a system-wide version of the FFmpeg software, as there's no need to copy its internal headers anymore.

It is recommended that you use the SVN version of FFmpeg if you want to use the latest FFmpeg build. All users are urged to update to MPlayer 1.2.1 as soon as possible, which they can download right now from our website.