After some experimenting I finally got a 1080p video working on my system (Pentium 4 3.4GHz 1GiB RAM nVidia GeForce 6800). I thought some people could possibly be interested in reading how I solved the audio-latency/heavy CPU-usage problems.

Mplayer insisted that my system was too slow so I took its advice and tried to lower the settings. I have now found a functional setup that gives me a decent CPU-load and acceptable quality.

Step 1
Create the file /usr/local/bin/mplayer-x264

Code:
sudo -e /usr/local/bin/mplayer-x264
Code:
#!/bin/bash
nice -n 0 mplayer -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=2:fast:skiploopfilter=all:threads=8 "${1}"
Step 2
Make it executable

Code:
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/mplayer-x264
Step 3
Play your video

Code:
mplayer-x264 *.mkv
Newer systems (try this)
  • Lower the lowres option to 1 or 0