I've run Mplayer on previous Linux installations but never had this problem. When I click the fullscreen button, the image rescales to the size of my screen, but remains confined to the window, allowing me to see only a small portion of the image. It kind of works if I maximize the screen, but the task- and title-bar remain. Any ideas how to fix the problem?

Try a different video driver (-vo option).

Do mplayer -vo help for a list.

I tried all the video codecs that are available on my installation (I have Suse 9.0, btw), but none of them worked any better. Most in fact, were worse, either in video quality, brightness, color, something. And none worked in full screen. I'm beginning to wonder if it's some sort of priority problem, though I doubt it.

Which video card do you have? .. and what X driver are you using with the card?

My card is an ATI radeon 9600 with 128MB of RAM (though Suse's using the drivers for the 9000, since that seems to be the only one that works) and I think the driver Mplayer uses is called X11/Xv. There are several others listed in Mplayer's 'Properties' dialog, but, as I said, this one works best out of those available.

Well.. it does matter.. in mplayer

xv takes advantage of accelerated video scaling on the card. As with OpenGL, if this feature works well, it can map only one physical display device (usually).

x11 is just a plain ole x11 driver (useful when you have multiple active devices showing the same screen).

I'm going to guess that the 9600 could be the problem. You may want to try the ATI proprietary drivers and see if that clears things up. The bad news is that the ATI drivers may not work at all with the new xorg version of X. But I can't say anything for sure on that.

If you're serious about using a good card with Linux, Nvidia is the way to go.

I've installed the ATI drivers for my card. Everything seemed to install fine. I was asked to go to /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod and run make.sh then switch to /lib/modules/fglrx and run make_install.sh. So I did that, ran fglrxconfig, and everything seemed fine. I restarted X and ran fglrxinfo in the terminal and got:

display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: Mesa project: www.mesa3d.org
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect
OpenGL version string: 1.3 Mesa 4.0.4

so it looks like it's working, but any programs requiring openGL still tell me no 3D accelerator is installed. Plus, I'm still having the same MPlayer problem.

I tried running fglrxinfo as root from a terminal window and got:

Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

Error: unable to open display :0

So I have no clue why the driver isn't working (or maybe it is and Suse doesn't know? That seems unlikely) and I still am having this MPlayer problem, which is happening with both MPlayer and gMPlayer.

Well... I think we need someone with that card to post. I stopped using ATI quite a while ago (probably will never go back).

Don't know what to suggest.

The ironic part is that just a bit ago I had an nVidia card and sold it to my father. Oh well. Guess it gives me something to save for.

Yep... maybe ATI will get their act together someday (but I've said that many a time before... I'm tired of dealing with them).

Use XV driver

xv is an accelerated (video scaling) video mode.

I've been using the xv driver. As I said, it's the one that works the best, but still won't let me use fullscreen mode.

I had the same problem on my machine. Just pass it the -zoom option:

$ mplayer -zoom somefile.avi

Then you can press the [F] button to fullscreen and the window should also fullscreen.