I'm not suggesting it's really preferable in any situation or in any specific situation, I just found myself in a "what the hell" point and thought it worth a try, and it worked.

I was just thinking that it would be nice that for slideshow videos there was a variable frame rate, and turns out that it exist. I've found that the program handbrake can handle that easily, so I decided to install. Unfortunatelly it's only on Debians unnofficial multimedia repository, which can...

I don't get it. It wasn't like it inspired someone to say that it's the GUI that one ever dreamed about, but was fully functional, and funnily enough more reliable than all the alternative GUIs that used mplayer as a back-end, as far as I've looked at. I guess the decision eventually resulted in a (current to me at least) problem with subtitles/fontconfig, as subtitles will work on mplayer and mplayer2, but not on gmplayer, even though it never used to be that way before.

It's not...

Few days ago I've built a new gentoo environment: my previous system became a junkyard, so I ended up rebuilding it. First thing I've tested, is how it runs HD.

To mention entire list of updates:
Old system: Linux 2.6.34.8 x86_64 [amd64], nvidia-drivers 260.19.29, libx264 0.0.20101029(portage), mplayer 1.0_rc4_p20100612(--version gives SVN-r30554-4.4.3), vlc 1.1.4.
New system: Linux 2.6.38.4 x86_64 [amd64], nvidia-drivers 260.19.36, libx264 0.0.20110223(portage), mplayer...

I've been a VLC media player user for a long time. But some funny thing happened when I upgraded my gentoo and VLC started lagging extremely hard. I tried everything: from downgrading codec libraries to removing ~/.vlc : nothing helped. The problem was when I was trying to watch DVDs and some avi files, it shown "buffering" on every frame, and, of course, I had a hang of few seconds every time. I've decided to try mplayer, as many people told me it's teh best.
So I emerged mplayer...

Remember to use the X11 video driver in mplayer (and not the xv driver) to avoid flickery playback...