I exchanged e-mails a day ago with someone setting up mplayer to run in much the same way as what you see in my screenshots. The config file I use for mplayer was helpful to them, and so I’ll post it here in case it is helpful to someone else.

really-quiet="1"
vo="fbdev"
vf="scale=400:-3"
framedrop="1"

It’s short and not terrifically illuminating, but

• the really-quiet option trims away any output to the console (with only one or two minor omissions);
• vo declares the video output mode as the framebuffer device;
• the vf option scales the output to fit half of my 800×600 screen and whatever ratio is determined by the file;
• and setting framedrop to 1 sometimes smooths out skipping if the codec is too weighty, or the transfer rates are slow (I usually keep video files on an external drive, and watch them across USB1.1).

mplayer has about a zillion options, but these are useful at around... ... read more >>> kmandla.wordpress.com