somebody need to work on mencoder, i think it is single threaded. so having an origin or anything like that won't speed up the dvd to divx, or whatever to divx, mplayer needs to multithreaded, i mean, smp is the future, and yes, mplayer kicks alot of ass. it doesn't have a history function on the gui, it can be used without a gui, or even X, it supports a bunch of odd ass hardware