Here’s something I had to look up today that I don’t wanna dig around for anymore. The default settings for MPlayer to seek backwards and forwards is to jump 10 seconds at a time. Today I had to do a lot of jumping on DVDs, mostly to find title tracks on short cartoons, and 10 seconds would often skip right past it.
You can change the defaults if you want, by creating an input configuration file for events. Just edit ~/.mplayer/input.conf and add the event name, then the command, one per line. Here’s what I added to make mine jump only 4 seconds instead:
RIGHT seek +4
LEFT seek -4
For the actual documentation, check this out.