MPlayer is a movie player for LINUX (runs on many other Unices, and
non-x86 CPUs, see the documentation). It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI,
VIVO, ASF/WMV, QT/MOV, FLI, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, and some
RealMedia files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs.
You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, FLI, and even DivX movies too
(and you don't need the avifile library at all!).

Another big feature of mplayer is the wide range of supported output
drivers.  It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, but
you can use SDL (and this way all drivers of SDL), VESA (on every VESA
compatible card, even without X!), and some lowlevel card-specific
drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and Radeon) too! Most of them supports
software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen.
MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards,
such as the DVB and DXR3/Hollywood+ !  And what about the nice big
antialiased shaded subtitles (9 supported types!!!) with european/ISO
8859-1,2 (hungarian, english, czech, etc), cyrillic, korean fonts, and
OSD?

MPlayer might fail due to lack of shared memory, e.g. when using gui mode
under KDE.  Starting with OpenBSD 3.3, sysctl(8) can modify the shared
memory parameters. In particular kern.shminfo.shmall might need to
be raised, e.g. 

sysctl kern.shminfo.shmall=32768

On i386 mplayer can use win32 codecs if they are installed (package
win32-codecs) and if the machdep.userldt sysctl is enabled, e.g. by
entering

sysctl machdep.userldt=1

Both sysctl settings can also be achieved via /etc/sysctl.conf.

On arm (e.g. Zaurus) you may encounter slow video output.
In this case you can disable the X.Org screen rotation in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf. Depending on the video you are playing
you may want to pass the -framedrop or the -hardframedrop
option to mplayer.
By default we disable the internal mp3lib (mpg123), because
it relies on the FPU. Instead of using mp3lib the mad flavor
is enabled by default. If you want to use libmad as an audio
decoder please pass the -ac mad option to mplayer.

Flavors:

  arts: enables arts, requires x11/kde/arts3

  esd: enables esd, requires audio/esound

  sdl: enables sdl, requires devel/sdl

  ggi: enables ggi, requires graphics/ggi

  debug: enables debugging information

  mad: enables mad, requires audio/libmad

  no_x11: disables gui and most video output.

  aa: enables ascii art, requires graphics/aalib