Gnome MPlayer is a GTK2/GTK3 interface for one of the most popular media players on Linux. This easy to use interface gives you the ability to configure the powerful MPlayer in whatever way you like and get the desired results as easy as possible.
You can play all your multimedia (audio, video, CD, DVDs, and VCDs, streams etc.), organize, sort and create playlists, take screenshots while playing videos and be notified about media changes.
Playing from Sources
You can open a file, a folder, a location or a disk that can be an audio CD, a DVD with menus using a folder structure, an iso DVD with menus or a Video CD. Gnome MPlayer has full DVD and MKV chapter support, when supported by Mplayer.
Apart from those “classic” sources you can also open Analog or Digital TV or even your iPod device. These of course need the corresponding hardware to work.
Playlist
Gnome MPlayer playlist management is just what you need as it offers the ability to save and load playlists, move items up or down, delete, shuffle, repeat and open a location straight from there. What else would you ask for?
Preferences
Gnome MPlayer is really all about offering a fast and easy way to set your playback preferences. You can do simple things like choosing preferred subtitles and language audio (from what is available) from the edit menu, or go deeper and tune the interface and plugin settings.
You can enable Video Hardware Support, Crystal HD Hardware support, change the audio output device straight from the player preferences and choose 5.1 or even 7.1 speakers! You can also set the MPlayer to apply various levels of post-processing.
Subtitles
You can set the fonts, colors, scaling and encoding of the subtitles to reach the desired result. If this is not enough for you, you can also apply shadows and outline the subtitle font. You can also enable Advanced Substation Alpha and choose to view or not, the embedded subtitles found in some MKV files.
Here you see how it looks with the standard settings. Pretty clear isn’t it?
The only thing that I missed is the ability to delay or hasten the subtitles. This is really needed sometimes, but you won’t have any problems of that kind with embedded or DVD subs.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Missing keyboard shortcuts would be crazy wouldn’t it? Gnome MPlayer offers all the shortcuts you will need, plus the ability to reconfigure them and set your preferred buttons instead of the defaults.
Conclusion
Gnome MPlayer is a tool that does two things actually. It does make MPlayer a lot easier to configure and use its great power and abilities, while at the same time it makes it look great inside Gnome Shell as it uses GTK3 and the look and feel is based on the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines.
This is not an official part of Gnome, but it looks like it is, and also is a lot more powerful than Totem so why not give it a try?