"dont try mplayer unless you want to write codecs and drivers for you hardware"
Huh? Not only does mplayer not require you to write codecs (Why the hell you'd think you'd have to I don't know), but in addition to codecs such as xvid that the source code or precompiled linux libraries are available for, mplayer works with windows codecs (and we all know there is no shortness of those). Not that I'm saying that xine doesn't, mind you (I haven't used xine enough to find out one way or the other about this), but it really isn't hard to get your hands on these codecs as they are available from the mplayer official site (along with compiled mplayer binaries for a few different distributions). As for writing drivers.....double huh? If you haven't got video card drivers for your video card, you've got a lot more problems than just mplayer not working - on the order of the entirity of X (the graphical interface) not working.
Computing is about choice, and if you prefer Xine, that's cool, of course....but I'd really like to know why the hell you thought a person would have to go to any real effort to get mplayer to work. For me it took running "echo "deb
http://marillat.free.fr unstable" >> /etc/apt/sources.list; apt-get update; apt-get install mplayer w32codecs" on my debian machine - for people using other distros they might actually have to download the files on
www.mplayerhq.hu by hand and install them manually - but still not a *huge* effort.
Don't believe the (anti-)hype
Linear Mode
