I've read true a whole lot of threads on mplayer on the forum and googled for a few hours but I can't find the solution or even someone with the same problem.
Mplayer works fine, it plays movies in great quality and sound works just as well. Only problem is that I can't use it in fullscreen (got the mplayer gui installed to)
Right clicking on the playing movie and choosing fullscreen makes the complete screen filled but the playing movie stays the smae size (rest is black)
If I use Kplayer it does work but subtitles and quality are less, so I prefer to user mplayer directly. In the preference video is set to X11 and got most of the options enabled (except for HARD framedropping) Any clues on how to get fulscreen going?

Regards

I had this problem for a while too. I think it has to do with the video driver being used by mplayer (or gmplayer). Using gmplayer, if you go into 'preferences' under the 'video' tab, tr using the 'xv' video driver. The 'x11' video driver didn't allow full-screen for me, but 'xv' did.

Well, that does work! Thanx, sorry to see that the quality is a little less. Well it does save a reboot to win for bsplayer so I'm happy!

try the other players and see if any have the quality and the fullscreen capabilities. to find out, run :
mplayer -vo help
to save changing the preferences each time, you can just run:
gmplayer -vo x11 (or whatever) file

Try to use -zoom with -vo x11, this will allow full-screen with x11.
I only use mplayer from console, I don't know how to use -zoom with GUI.

"f" gives full screen

The xv driver used to be the default one for me, but after I've upgraded my kernel version (in fact many packages, but I guess the kernel made the difference) It would work anymore, and I got the following error:

VO: [xv] 532x222 => 532x222 Planar YV12
[ws] Error in display. 0.078 ct: 0.000 1/ 1 ??% ??% ??,?% 0 0
[ws] Error code: 11 ( BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation) )
[ws] Request code: 140
[ws] Minor code: 19
[ws] Modules: flip_page

Then I started to use the X11 (-vo x11). The movie was OK, but If I choose full-screen (or any other size than the original one), the mplayer window was resized, but not the screen actually.

After I've started to call gmplayer with -zoom the problem was solved.

This is an old thread but still very relevant.

Edit the GMplayer icon and add -zoom to the end of the command line. Mine looks like this:

Fullscreen then works fine in x11. You can also use SMplayer. I think it adds the -zoom when it calls mplayer or mencoder.

WHY?
More than you ever wanted to know about why this happens.

With the newer GL extensions most systems flash uncontrollably using hardware accelerated video with any gl output. The issue is that the video window gets repainted by X, apparently when it detects a change in the output causing flashing during playback, sometimes even in fullscreen. If it's just turned off the video playback window stays put when you drag the frame around. NOT good. Windows does the same thing but it's less noticeable because of the way they code the video "backend" (the code that updates the windows). Keep in mind that GL (3D output) is actualy a hardware surface (a hardware isolated place on the card) that replaces a "chromatic" color in the output window or uses an output buffer coordinate system to map a window. You may have seen the green or purple chroma color in a video window before on older overlay cards.

The hardware has to be told where this window exists in the "output buffer" or it gets all messed up. The original way to do this was to use an (as in one) "overlay surface" in the output. The overlay on older cards is a special place in memory called a hardware gate array that can do some video decoding making video playback less cpu intensive. Along comes GL and that scheme no longer works well. A simple browser window can have several video outputs but there is only one available overlay. It would require many overlay surfaces to work properly which is stupid.

The solution is to move the hardware decoding out of that special place in memory, putting it in some kind of hardware stream decoder (called a fall-through gate array). This allows the same hardware decoder to play multiple video streams simultaneously, or so it seems. Each video output sets the FGA (Fallthrough gate array) output address to it's video window buffer and writes a frame, then releases the decoder for the next video window. I'm not an ATI developer but I suspect this is the general approach they are either implementing now or heading towards. This scheme can be easily integrated into a GPU (General Purpose Utility) processor. The GPU can then draw polygons directly in the output buffer for 3D and the output muxer (multiplexer, a fancy word for video mixer) can mix live video, bitmaps, and GL output in a fully constrained hardware protected window anywhere in the output. Unfortunately it's easier to create new hardware than new software because of history.

Eventually all video related processing will be done on the video chip rather than using the main processor for polygons, video decoding etc. But we are at least 10 years away from that. We need a hardware transition processor (system based serial bus vs multiplexed parallel bus) to make that really work well. This has significant advantages for the developer because the GPU on the video card supports a language that is specific to video which also frees up room in the MPU (Master Processing Unit) for more efficient general purpose programming resulting in much better overall performance.

Future?
It's being worked on in Xorg 7x but it's probably not going to be fully working for a while. I suspect there needs to be a rewrite of the entire X window system to integrate hardware video with GL extensions properly. In the mean time Nvidia seems to have the issue well in hand apparently at the expense of cpu. ATI is working on it but has a long way to go. They have hardware GL output working for most cards in the fglrx driver but it won't integrate well with GL (Xgl for most others since ati uses the proprietary aiglx extention). I guess this means be patient while it's being fixed. This is a volunteer written operating system, as all operating environments "should" be. They provide an important resource for students and new thoughts for future development.
-Tom

I found the same problem after installing debian and found a solution in the debian forums.
This is a paraphase of what I found, I don't take credit for this.
try in a console

xvinfo

if this says

screen #0
no adaptors present

try

sudo apt-get install firmware-linux*

then reboot!!!!

this worked for me. ( when I remembered to reboot )

hope this helps.

Dave.