How do I prevent mplayer from resuming/playing when entering or leaving fullscreen?

Question

When I press f to toggle the full screen mode of mplayer, mplayer immediately starts playing. This is not the behavior I want.

I searched the man page and couldn't find anything useful. The only thing I could find was the hidden setting PlayWhenEnterFullScrn of MPlayerX, a mplayer frontend on OS X .

Unfortunately after checking the MPlayerX source, it does not use an existing feature of mplayer.

Is there any way to achieve the indented behavior with mplayer (or any fork like mpv for that matter)?

Answer 1

You can achieve the desired behaviour from the MPlayer commandline by using the -pausing option. This worked well on my system with the following syntax:

mplayer -vo xv -pausing 2 input.mp4

When testing I noted that this syntax also worked well with -vo x11 but unfortunately failed with my preferred accelerated video output: -vo vdpau.

All available options for -pausing can be seen in the MPlayer man pages:

-pausing <0-3> (MPlayer only)

Specifies the default pausing behaviour of commands, i.e. whether MPlayer will
continue playback or stay paused after the command has finished. See
DOCS/tech/slave.txt for further details.

  0 resume  
  1 pause (pausing)
  2 keep the paused / playing status (pausing_keep)
  3 toggle the paused / playing status (pausing_toggle)
  4 pause without frame step (experimental) (pausing_keep_force)

The option 4 would have been ideal as it promises to eliminate the slight frame step seen with the other options but this failed completely on my system...

References:

• MPlayer man pages...