Mplayer

From GTALUG

mplayer

MPlayer is a movie player application for Linux (and other Unix variations)

It supports linking in a variety of "codecs" for decoding and playing various special video and music binary formats. In some cases, you can make use of "codec" (e.g. - drivers) written for Windows to play the file on Linux. There has been some licensing controversy surrounding this as some of those drivers are proprietary and may not be licensed by their makers for use on Linux. The legalities surrounding that are ambiguous, hence the controversy.

MPlayer builds aggressively target platform-specific compiler options as well as some assembler in order to take advantage of special CPU capabilities including DSP-like things like Intel's MMX system. The nature of video processing is such that this can actually provide performance benefits.