Since I didn’t have any luck playing videos on the RPi using mplayer I found omxplayer after some search. It has the ability to use the RPi’s GPU thus taking some load of the CPU.
UPDATE 2013-04-01: omxplayer is now included in the Raspbian (Debian Wheezy) repositories and can be simply installed by one line.
sudo apt-get install omxplayer
Check another article on how to install Raspbian.
OMXPlayer binary (.deb) downloads can be found here: http://omxplayer.sconde.net/
Install dependencies
apt-get install libpcre3 fonts-freefont-ttf fbset libpcre3-dev libpcrecpp0 libva-dev libva-x11-1 libva1
Install omxplayer
wget http://omxplayer.sconde.net/builds/omxplayer_0.2.4~git20121205~ec7ac68f_armhf.deb
dpkg -i omxplayer_0.2.4~git20121205~ec7ac68f_armhf.deb
Play video
omxplayer -o hdmi video.mp4
Note: If there is no sound when playing through the HDMI interface make sure your /boot/config.txt file has the following line (and it’s not commented out).
hdmi_drive = 2
OMXPlayer Key bindings
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| 1 | Increase Speed |
| 2 | Decrease Speed |
| j | Previous Audio stream |
| k | Next Audio stream |
| i | Previous Chapter |
| o | Next Chapter |
| n | Previous Subtitle stream |
| m | Next Subtitle stream |
| s | Toggle subtitles |
| q | Exit OMXPlayer |
| Space or p | Pause/Resume |
| – | Decrease Volume |
| + | Increase Volume |
| Left | Seek -30 |
| Right | Seek +30 |
| Down | Seek -600 |
| Up | Seek +600 |
Your installation process worked great for me. I could immediately play .mp4 and .mov videos just fine. Now I’ll have to get a license to play MPEG-2 and VC-1 formats. Thanks for posting your procedure!