I have finally gotten round to add mplayer and mencoder packages to the Linuxtech repo. To be honest I had these packages mostly finished a year ago but then somehow they got forgotten in the workinprogress folder, but now I have reviewed them and done some further tweaks and testing and finally placed them in the Linuxtech-release repo.

Since I started working on these packages a year ago they are based on the 1.0rc4 source code tarball which is slightly aged now (since now 1.1 is out) but rather than spending more time looking at making a 1.1 release I thought it's best to release 1.0rc4 first and then look at 1.1 in the near future (hopefully).

As a partial compensation for the long wait these mplayer packages come with an extra bonus: VA-API hardware decoding support! (in addition to Nvidia VDPAU support)

As far as I'm aware no other mplayer package for EL6 has VA-API support included so if you have a ATI or Intel GPU that supports VA-API hardware decoding then this mplayer package is just the one for you.

To use VA-API hardware decoding use the following switches:
mplayer -vo vaapi -va vaapi somemoviefile.mov

To find out more about VA-API on EL6 read the HOW-TO here:
http://scientificlinuxforum.org/index.php?showtopic=1629

official web site:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/

Quick install instructions:
1) install the linuxtech.repo config file if you don't have it already:
su - root
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget http://pkgrepo.linuxtech.net/el6/release/linuxtech.repo
2) install mplayer:
yum install mplayer
3) optionally instal mencoder if you want it:
yum install mencoder