You can make MPlayer play h264-encoded video files a lot faster on multicore machines if you graft some libraries from the ffmpeg-mt project into the resulting mplayer binary. We need to recompile for this.

SMPlayer intends to be a complete front-end for MPlayer (video player), from basic features like playing videos, DVDs, and VCDs to more advanced features like support for MPlayer filters and more.

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2.

MPlayer 1.0 initially entered its release candidate phase in 2006 followed by a second release candidate in October of 2007. MPlayer 1.0 RC3 is compatible with the FFmpeg 0.5.x branch and the new features it brings, support for new binary codecs, NVIDIA VDPAU acceleration, support for new architectures / platforms, and other changes.

Uoti Urpala, one of the core developers of mplayer, maintains a forked branch of mplayer that contains a lot of interesting patches that are not (yet) included in the main svn repository

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE (2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs.

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE (2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs.

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE (2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs.

smplayer is a cool front end to mplayer and can be used on ubuntu. This tutorial teaches how to install it on ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty