NOTE: This document is a little bit outdated, but still it could be useful.

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Not so obvious things

There's still no manual or help in smplayer.

So I think I should explain some things that are not so obvious.

* Stop button. Pressing the Stop button once stops the video. If you
press Play, the video will resume at the same point. But if you press
Stop twice the time position is reset to 0, so Play will start the video
from the beginning.

* The pause button. The first time you click on it, the video is
paused. The following times it will step to the next frame. This
behavior only occurs with the pause button, not with the pause option in
the menu.

* Double clicking in the video window toggles fullscreen.

* The Esc key can be used to exit from fullscreen mode.

* The O key switches OSD modes (the same way mplayer does)

* The option Open->URL doesn't check if you really typed a URL. What
you type is passed to mplayer. So you may use this option to play not
supported yet media, for instance TV channels, VCD, or anything
supported by mplayer.

* You can use the mouse wheel to go forward or backward.

* Probably you'll have noticed that when you select some options the
video window goes black for a moment and then resumes. This is because
smplayer has to stop mplayer and start it again (with new options) and
cannot be avoided.

* If you play a DVD you'll see that smplayer won't save the settings
(audio, subtitles and so on), so if you play it again later you will
have to select your desired options again. Some time ago, smplayer did
save the settings for DVDs but I removed it. Reasons: resuming playback
at the same point is not possible (mplayer fault, it doesn't report the
actual current time) and the disc had to be read twice, one for
identifying it and other for starting playback. That could be very slow.

* Deinterlace. mplayer has a lot of deinterlace filters. I have chosen 3
for smplayer: 

 * Lowpass5 (pp=l5). Works well most of the time, even with divx videos
 which have been bad deinterlaced. But this filter produces some "ghost"
 effect in movement scenes.

 * Yadif. It seems it works very well with mpeg files at full
 resolution. No ghosting, but some times the movement is not smooth. The
 bad part is that uses a lot of CPU.

 * Linear Blend (pp=lb). Produces a lot of ghosting and blurs the
 image.

* Video filters:

 * Autodetect phase.  Most movies and TV series (in PAL world) are not
 interlaced but progressive. But maybe in the computer they may seem
 interlaced (this happens to me sometimes with my dvd recorder). It
 seems that those videos have a field changed or shifted or something
 like that. "Autodetect phase" fixes it (-vf phase=A).

 * Denoise. This filter removes noise from the image, making it
 cleaner. But it could also remove a lot of details...

 * Deblock. If the blocks of a video are very noticeable this filter
 could help a little bit.

 * Dering. Actually I don't know what this filter does...

 * Add noise. Add a little bit of noise to the image. Can be useful to
 "cover" the blocks with noise or after a denoise, so the image doesn't
 look so extremely clean.

