Its been a little over a year now sence a major release.

When will Mplayer-1.0pre8 come out?
Whats going on with the delay?

I'm not sure if I understand the whole mplayer thing. Its popularity exceeds both Xine & VLC, both of which seem to me atleast to provide more functionality, is easier to compile/install, supports dvd menu navigation, more stable and have quicker release cycles. VLC rarely crashes on me, is easy on the cpu and plays equally long list of formats. In fact mplayer actually owes VLC for its encrypted dvd playback, but still can't navigate dvd menus. Which VLC in its current state does. VLC even has support for visualizations and exported playlists. Something gmplayer/mplayer still doesn't have. Xine is also a powerful player and can basically play anything mplayer can, sometimes even better.

It basically seems to mirror the whole Microsoft vs *nix thing. Why does 90% of the desktop population use an OS that has no innate value other mspaint, solitaire, and notepad(along with a couple of other boring start menu programs) and only recently(post windows ME) became just usable enough to not spit curses at it every few minutes.

Mplayer it outrageously lightweight which makes it a big plus in lots of peoples eyes. I am a VLC user however as most of the crap can be compiled out of it, something I only recently realised and was until then one of those pesky mplayer users.

OP: Build it from CVS, it has a GTK2 interface and a couple of other new things to play with

I have been thinking about that too, as I mainly use VLC for playing movies. But Mplayer is, as cs-cam already mentioned, very lightweight. And I have used mplayer for recording online live radio broadcasts, for example. While I haven't tried that with VLC, the simplicity of how it is done with mplayer would be hard to beat. And mplayer is the only player I have managed to get working just right with a plugin in Opera and Firefox. Or is there a *working* VLC plugin for Linux?

Does does VLC work in console mode?
Does VLC play Video DVDs, and Audio CDs in console mode?

(By the way, I love console mode.)

Can anyone tell me anything about Mplayers release schedule?

Maybe ask the developers? They're more likely to know than we are.

I've just found out that Mplayer-1.0pre8 was released!

Just to say that I prefer mplayer over xine. Don't exactly know why. But once (a long time ago) I wanted to play some vcd's with xine but the picture would just go bad after a while. Tried the same vcd's with mplayer and no problemo. After that I have been an mplayer fan.
I never heard of VLC! I'm hearing about this here the fisrt time. I'll go download it right away to check it out.