This is probably nothing new to everybody here but I just discovered that ubuntu and mplayer work very well for playing my video files on my old 2.8Ghz Pentium D pc.

VLC in Windows played 720p files but the playback was choppy in places. VLC in Ubuntu did the same thing. After switching to mplayer--and installing the appropriate drivers (thank you, EnvyNG) for my ATI x300SE card--video playback is smooth.

My only problem now is that the audio drifts out of synch a little but I've read that I can solve that by installing gst-ffmpeg 0.10.4 from source and then using ubuntu's default totem movie player.

I'm really impressed with Ubuntu and had to share a little of my excitement. First off, everything worked after a painless install - including sound and my network card. Also, as a veteran Windows user, I find it really cool that add/remove programs actually adds programs.

Mplayer is very powerful and there are some options you can add to make audio stay in sync. In mplayer.conf or config (these are found in the ~/.mplayer folder and on my system with newest svn it use config but older software uses mplayer.conf) you can add the different run time options (a sample file):

vo=gl:rectangle=1:swapinterval=1:slice-height=0 # yuv=3 introduces tearing
double=true # double buffering, set to false for 1080p x264 videos as CPU isn't fast enough to decode
lavdopts=fast=1:skiploopfilter=all:threads=2 # for multi core processors x.264
cache=8128 # you should always have some cache setting in KB.
vsync=true # sync on vertical
autosync=30 # checks every 30 secs to make sure audio is in sync (adjust as needed)
framedrop=true # drop a frame to sync audio if behind
brightness=1 # adjust brightness
afm=hwac3 # output to spdif if ac3 or DTS
ao=alsa # sound driver to use
stop-xscreensaver=true # don't have screensaver pop up during movie

Also, you can stack these when running different types of media,

vo=xvmc,xv,gl # try XvMC first, then xv, etc.
ac=hwac3,hwdts,pcm,a52 # try ac3 to spdif, dts to spdif, raw pcm, lastly software mpeg decoding

Here is docs that explains these options in detail:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html

Thanks, Michael. I was wondering about a lot of those options that you mentioned. I'm going to try to edit my config file tonight.

Awesome, I think the autosync and framedrop options fixed the audio drifting out of sync.

I even tried the 'vo=gl...' line and it seemed to work but when I went back into the 'preferences' gui in mplayer it still showed that I was using the vc video output. Also, the framedrop option was unchecked even though it was still in my config file. It's also a little confusing that there's a gui.conf also.

I'm trying to find the option to automatically set mplayer's volume to max.