i've just compiled mplayer !

on ports comments they says:

"
On arm (e.g. Zaurus) you may encounter slow video output.
In this case you can disable the X.Org screen rotation in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf. Depending on the video you are playing
you may want to pass the -framedrop or the -hardframedrop
option to mplayer.
By default we disable the internal mp3lib (mpg123), because
it relies on the FPU. Instead of using mp3lib the mad flavor
is enabled by default. If you want to use libmad as an audio
decoder please pass the -ac mad option to mplayer.
"


it is working but i do encouter the "slow video output" problem i tried with a zaurus encoded video (starwars.avi) and i only got about 0.5 - 1 frame/s, with choppy sound...

i tried -framedrop and -hardframedrop but it was not better...
i tried -as mad too with no better results...
i tried -nosound then the video looked ok, with quite good frame/s although it looked like slow motion...

any success for someone?

0.5. - 1 frames ... it's totally unusable.
Even a Palm OS PDA can run smooth video (with proper conversion), but is it really a taboo for OBSD?

Has anyone looked into processor/memory use on openbsd on a desktop vs linux (say knoppix, for ease) on the same desktop using mplayer? Is it that there is something about the way openbsd works that means it will do media (or load firefox, for that matter) slower, or is it something to do with the way it is being built for the Z?

The speed (or lack thereof) issue is a bit offputting, given how cool the rest of the project sounds

jpmatrix, how was the video encoded?
Mathemajikian's Tips & Tricks says:

I have yet to find out how multimedia works under obsd, because I am still busy getting Chinese inputmethod working. Will start a new topic on this.

well the ffmpeg re encoding seems to work pretty good, although it seems i had no sound output (or the sound level was too low). the framerate is now quite good, even without -framedrop option.
but the picture size is very little...