Why?

a large collection of off-line flv files (from YouTube and otherwise) and an extremely large (several hundreds of GBs in DVDs) Matroska collection with:
- AAC audio
- h.264 (High Definition - 1280x720 res) video
- A-SS/SSA, styled with embedded fonts subtitles which I want to be auto-loaded and properly displayed when the file is played
- No desire whatsoever to convert anything into anything.

Yeah, mplayer (and AFAIK only that) can play most of these properly but the performance couldn't possibly be any worse. And I have an Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 2GB of DDR2 RAM and (unfortunately) and ATI Radeon x1950 Pro (NOT to be confused with the x1900, they're NOT the same and not well supported).

With this beast I can't even run a HD h.264 video in full screen AT ALL.
Either it'll drop frames HARD or it'll down-sample the video to a crappy pixelized shadow of its' original crystal quality...


Ok, I spent most of this post to pre-answer the "why bother" kinds of questions but that's ok, the title itself was pretty self-explanatory as it was...

Till now I've managed to "install" it under wine but for whatever reason it can't "see" any files I try to feed it.

Any ideas?

As long as you don't have the right video drivers for the card, installing media player on linux won't do you any help. If it will ever play, it will play just as slow as mplayer.

As long as you don't have working drivers, there's nothing that will help, you simply need to avoid software scaling.

btw. I don't know if you noticed, but installing media player on linux is a pretty sick idea .

I surfed around a little and it seems that there is 2D support for this card from the official ATI drivers (version 8.42.3). This means that if you properly install the ATI drivers (something along these lines) you should have xv properly configured and you should be able to use the "-ov xv" option with mplayer.

This will solve your problem.

greetings,
elluva

I did try to install the driver.

It was in LinuxMint using Envy.
That method didn't seem to help much.

Will try the manual way.

When I said "installed" I meant both trying to run it from my HD through wine as well as "installing" in wine the K-Lite megapack just so as to make sure everything needed was there...

Installing Media Player won't help you. When you've installed your graphicsdriver, you should try typing xvinfo on the commandline and paste the output here. Then we can see if your installation worked. You should post your /etc/X11/xorg.conf as well...