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MPlayer Tools is the result of one thing: a lazy perl programmer (me) overused a great movie player called MPlayer.
Althought personally I consider MPlayer the best player ever (I even listen to music only with MPlayer) it's not that comfortable to use. It has a GUI but personally I think that even makes things worse (as GUIs do in general).
The beauty of using free software is that you are free to use your imagination. MPlayer Tools started as a simple hack, a script that using bash functions wrapped MPlayer to catch it's output, and analyze it. It has options even I can't remember. But there is a documentation to refresh your memory and the default behaviour indulges every lazy people. I hope everyone will agree with me that MPlayer Tools is the CLI heaven for MPlayer users.
When I bought my TV Tuner I saw that MPlayer needed just a little bit help there too. And that is why now everybody can have scripts like tv, tvrecord and tvtimeshift. I would like to mention an interesting feature: configure a memory filesystem and you can spare your hard drive because tvtimeshift can save a couple of minutes data there. Also: tvtimeshift uses only as much space as you are timeshifted.
The bottom line is: go to a directory containing movies, type mstart all, and quit MPlayer whenever you like. To resume your movie just say: cdm;mstart all. MPlayer Tools remembers everything. Every movie will be played exactly once but if you want to see the movies again from the directory say mstrip ./ and this will remove from the logfile the movies from the current directory.
And if you like to watch movies from multiple directories don't worry, there are things for you like mlist or cdm 1.
MPlayer Tools also helps you if you want to watch movie series. It detects series based on the filenames; stores and counts episode names, you can define specific MPlayer options for every series and a nice utility called cds will show you the last watched episode and will go to it's directory.
And the benefits never end, just to mention a few more: cdd will go back to a directory where you previously watched something; starting from mplayer-tools 6.0 the configuration file has conditions like the IF statement in programming languages.
Starting from version 7.0 MPlayer Tools has a GUI. Yes, I know, I just said that GUIs are bad, but I have to admit, you can't manage a playlist without a GUI. And hopefully I can lure more people into trying MPlayer Tools now that it has a user friendly GUI.
Hopefully you are now convinced to try the scripts. Download and unpack it, say ./configure && make install, re-login (to activate the bash functions and aliases) and enjoy. You may also associate your video/audio files with mgui.
And if something is not comfortable enough then contact me. My email address can be found in the AUTHORS file.
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