Support for multi-threading is in
recent SVN versions of mplayer. You can follow
this article to add a repository with these versions. These are builds by the mplayer staff itself, so they should be trustworthy.
You will need to add "-lavdopts threads=4" to the mplayer command to use all four cores.
I'm not using the version in the repositories because I build the
mplayer2 fork from source. (It has some features like support for ordered chapters in Matroska that aren't in the main trunk.) However that's basically a patched version of the SVN code, and I can confirm it uses all four cores when using the xv video driver to display 1080p material.
libvdpau only works with recent NVIDIA cards (8xxx and later). If you have an NVIDIA adapter, install the proprietary drivers if you haven't already, then use "-vo vdpau" or select it from the driver list in smplayer. This method offloads the H.264 decoding process to the graphics hardware. If you can use this approach, you won't need to worry about multi-threading.
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