Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Sometime back here we had a brief review and discussion of Linux video players. Xine, XMMS and Mplayer were all among the favorites. At first I was mostly using xine until some other users here alerted me to Mplayer. Xine is good mind you, but I had problems with some codecs and could not play quicktime at all. Mplayer solved all of that, it runs every format I have asked it to run, it was cake to setup and its never had really any problem at all. One thing I will complain about (because complaining is my forte) is that all the Linux players seem to have two windows, one for the "controls" and one for the "viewer", I hate that (many might like it, but I dont, it might be configurable somewhere but I cant find it with mplayer).

Now Oreilly has an article about myplayer that also sings its praises. It goes over the Mplayer history and installing and tweaking it. Note that it also mentions Movix which is an Mplayer only Linux distro. Its 8MB on a CD and makes your VCD or DiVX video bootable!