VLC & Mplayer

VLC
vlc is in the zubuntu repository, on the desktop it is very reliable player. It is part of the zubuntu repository and can be installed easily. Running it might be a little more complicated, because vlc does not allowed to be run by the root user (which is the default user in zubuntu). After
searching in google a little, I found out that either vlc has to be recompiled with the "--enable-run-as-root" switch or using the vlc-wrapper. In the later case, I used the following command,

SUDO_UID=4212 vlc-wrapper as root

The problem with this method is that vlc does not have permissions to change the configuration file (~/.config/vlc/vlcrc).
Searching a little more I found this post which describe how the vlc binary (/usr/bin/vlc) can be modified to be able to run as root. This method is (not so) elegant, but it beats recompiling. To summarize, using a hex-editor (I used hexedit from the zubuntu repositories), line 630, change geteuid to getppid.

The video playback though, is very disappointing, even when using vlc-sdl-plugin (also from the repositories)...

MPlayer
For some reason mplayer is not included the jaunty arm repositry. But it can be found in the Debian one. The easiest way I found it could be installed was simply to add the Sid repository to /etc/apt/sources.list. To install mplayer, add at the end of the file,

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian sid main

then update the package cache by,

apt-get update

then install mplayer,

apt-get install mplayer

and that's that. It may be advisable to remove the line from sources.list. mplayer shows better performance than vlc, but still not enough to watch movies (to my taste).