Hi I have a problem with mplayer. The machine on which is running Slackware 10.2 (kernel 2.4) is a little ancient, but good enough:
P2 400 MHz, 256 RAM, ATI 3D Rage Pro, ESS 1869.
I use to have SuSE 9.3 Before Slackware and there was no problem with mplayer I even watch DVD's with it and everything was cool. But I decide to move from SuSE to Slackware. Anyway I download the mplayer source and compile with the configure options --enable-gui --enable-large-files --enable-xv. So far so good, but when I play some file, the movie size is vey very small and when i switch to fullscreen there is not any change in that size it is very small. I try to use the option zoom=yes but when i Switch to fullscreen quality changes from bad to worse. I try to change the -vo but it seems that only driver that working properly with mplayer is X11, with any other mplayer crashes or playing with awful quality (really awful). I have no problem with the sound which is alsa. So I begin to think that the problem is not mplayer but the video driver. Should I try to change the driver with other and with which one ? I will be really grateful if someone here tell me what to do ?

The x11 vo doesn't support fullscreen, so you have to stick with -zoom for fullscreen.
Well somehow you should change your -vo driver to xv, cause anything else is just a pain in the ass.
I had a 3D Rage IIC for sometime, and it worked beautifully (tho not as good as even a gef2mx, in terms of picture quality) with using the default Driver "ati" in x.org config. Check that.

OK but How ?

mplayer -vo xv movie.avi

This doesn't work After this Mplayer crashes ... What should I do ?

In regards to this section:
You need to edit your xorg.conf file that lives somewhere in /etc/X11/... and change the driver in there. (there is a section under Device I believe where you can set the driver)

Here is a sample xorg.conf file (do not use it, I'm using it mainly to show you where the driver file is located.)

http://dev.gentoo.org/~fmccor/docs/x...xorg.conf.html

In this file this is the relevant section:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
BoardName "Sun|FFB2+ Creator 3D (series 3) (ffb2+)"
VendorName "Sun Microsystems"
Driver "sunffb"
EndSection

Naturally you'd change the Driver info form "sunffb" do the name of the driver you would like to use. In the previous poster's case, he used the "ati" driver. Myself I use the "radeon" driver. You need to know what graphics card you have, find out what linux display driver it uses, make the necessary change, and restart X.