I thought this may be of interest to the list, so I'm sharing. :) I've built some experimental mplayer packages for Fedora 11 and Rawhide (x86-32 and x86-64 arches) with shiny new features. Aside from being very recent snapshots, one of them includes support for hardware video playback acceleration via VDPAU and VAAPI, and the other includes support for multi-threaded playback (so you can split the decoding load across multiple cores). The playback acceleration can definitely be used on NVIDIA adapters (from the GeForce 8xxx series onwards) using the proprietary driver (not, unfortunately, nouveau). Also on Intel Poulsbo (GMA 500) adapters, using my packaged version of the native driver for that chipset (link is in the blog post). VDPAU acceleration is also allegedly possible on S3 Chrome 530 GT and S3 Chrome 540 GTX adapters using S3’s own driver, but I haven't had the chance to test that. Multi-threaded playback can be done on any system, but only really makes sense on those with multiple processors (cores). Full details of where, how and why are in my blog post: http://www.happyassassin.net/2009/09/03/mplayer-va-api-vdpau-ffmpeg-mt-ex... . Please do let me know how your experience goes! Thanks to Dominik, Nicolas and their predecessors for the main mplayer spec, on which these builds are based. Please let me know if you're interested in this work, guys. For now, I'm keeping the necessary support packages - libva, libvdpau, vdpau-video - in the repository along with the mplayer builds. I have libva up for review in the main Fedora repos at the moment, and I know libvdpau is hung up in review hell while the powers that be decide whether it can go into Fedora or not. Once that gets into a repository, we could certainly build the main mplayer package with VDPAU support at least, since that was merged into mainline mplayer months ago. Once libva gets in, we could build with VAAPI support (though I suppose we might want to wait until upstream accepts the patch). The multi-threading stuff is still fairly experimental, though, I believe. -- adamw