Another small mplayer tip, that I had to google for. When building MPlayer with XvMC support, so that it will use the video card’s hardware for MPEG2 decoding (and therefore, less CPU load on your box), mplayer -vo xvmc alone won’t work. You have to add -vc ffmpeg12mc as well, to force mplayer to use that codec for playback.
And, of course, I just noticed it says that right there on the man page. Whoops. So much for RTFM.
Anyway, if you like to use profiles, it makes things easier. Just drop this in ~/.mplayer/config and then do mplayer -profile xvmc movie.avi
[xvmc]
vo=xvmc
vc=ffmpeg12mc
I really can’t tell much difference in CPU load myself, since I’m running a fast box, but if you’ve got an older box with a decent (nvidia geforce 4 and up), give it a try. It’ll only work with MPEG2 videos, and the nvidia-drivers as well. I believe it works on the Intel i810 video cards too, though I don’t have one I can test it on.