Linux newbie - please help with ffmpeg

[nicco]

I'm using Kubuntu distribution, with Kaffeine (xine engine) and mplayer, and I installed ffmpeg package
I can playback my divx-xvid movies in both players, but how can I know if the decoder is using ffmpeg? And how can I set decoding parameters (like ffdshow)

Thank you!!

[nm]

FFmpeg is not a filter for a media framework like ffdshow, but a project that currently consists of a library of codecs and parsers and some applications (ffserver, ffplay). Video players and other programs can use libavcodec and libavformat from the FFmpeg project (like ffdshow does), but the decoder configuration is player-specific. FFmpeg also doesn't have many video processing filters; they are usually implemented separately in the player applications.

To configure decoding, post-processing and scaling filters, read the player documentation. At least MPlayer and some Xine-based players (like Kaffeine) have a lot of options.

By the way, there is also no need to install the ffmpeg package. It only contains the ffserver and ffplay programs, not the libraries used by MPlayer and libxine. The necessary dependencies are automatically installed when you install MPlayer or kaffeine-xine.