Introduction on mplayer
As in the title of this article, the subject is to show how to play a video file. Moreover, playing the video file without having to show the video or the graphic part. But only showing the audio part of the video file. Playing the video file using mplayer with only the audio part is possible. First of all, there is a general information about mplayer. According to the manual page, mplayer is a movie player. Well, it is basically an abbreviation of it.
Furthermore, there is also specific description about mplayer. Again, according to the manual page, mplayer is a movie player for Linux (runs on many other platforms and CPU architectures, see the documentation). It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, ASF/WMA/WMV, RM, QT/MOV/MP4, Ogg/OGM, MKV, VIVO, FLI, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM and RoQ files, supported by many native and binary codecs. You can watch VCD, SVCD, DVD, Blu-ray, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies, too.
It is a movie player that supports a wide range of video and audio output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, libcaca, DirectFB, Quartz, Mac OS X CoreVideo, but you can also use GGI, SDL (and all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA-compatible card, even without X11), some low-level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3dfx and ATI) and some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the Siemens DVB, Hauppauge PVR (IVTV), DXR2 and DXR3/Hollywood+. Most of them support software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen mode.
Another information about the mplayer that it has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls. European/ISO8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic and Korean fonts are supported along with 12 subtitle formats (MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS and our own: MPsub) and DVD subtitles (SPU streams, VOBsub and Closed Captions).
How to play a video file with activating the audio file only using mplayer
So, the following is the actual command in mplayer to play the audio part only of a video file. In order to achieve the purpose, just type the following command in the CLI or Command Line Interface :
mplayer -novideo video_file_name
The following is the execution of the above command using a real video file :
user@hostname:~/Downloads$ mplayer -novideo Episode\ 1.mp4 MPlayer 1.3.0 (Debian), built with gcc-7 (C) 2000-2016 MPlayer Team do_connect: could not connect to socket connect: No such file or directory Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control. Playing Episode 1.mp4. libavformat version 57.83.100 (external) libavformat file format detected. [mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x7fe6287202a0]Protocol name not provided, cannot determine if input is local or a network protocol, buffers and access patterns cannot be configured optimally without knowing the protocol [lavf] stream 0: video (h264), -vid 0 [lavf] stream 1: audio (aac), -aid 0, -alang jpn Clip info: major_brand: mp42 minor_version: 512 compatible_brands: isomiso2avc1mp41 creation_time: 2017-11-18T23:16:49.000000Z encoder: HandBrake 1.0.3 2017022500 Load subtitles in ./ ========================================================================== Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders libavcodec version 57.107.100 (external) AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, floatle, 160.4 kbit/5.22% (ratio: 20046->384000) Selected audio codec: [ffaac] afm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg AAC (MPEG-2/MPEG-4 Audio)) ========================================================================== AO: [pulse] 48000Hz 2ch floatle (4 bytes per sample) Video: no video ===== PAUSE ===== A: 11.7 (11.7) of 1478.0 (24:37.9) 0.5%