Watching movies with smplayer

The mplayer project is one of the best movie players for both windows and linux. Mplayer is basically a console based player. There are several projects on the internet providing GUI front ends to mplayer.
smplayer is one of the best front ends that you can download. Both source and binary releases of smplayer are available on sourceforge.

For installation on ubuntu 9.04 you can try the following steps. The mplayer bundled with jaunty is slightly outdated. You can update mplayer to a more recent version and install smplayer front end following the steps below.

Step 1
Add the following lines to /etc/sources.list

  deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/awn-testing/ubuntu jaunty main
  deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/rvm/mplayer/ubuntu jaunty main

Step 2
Open a terminal and add the apt key of the PPA

 sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 12345678
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 03E02400

Step 3
Update

 sudo apt-get update

Step 4
Install and enjoy.

 sudo apt-get install mplayer
sudo apt-get install smplayer

A windows version of smplayer is also available on the website.