[brundles]

Well the rebuild of MPlayer (including a rebuild of the X264 sources to make them CPU specific, but currently minus CoreAVC) has shown significant improvements - not enough to make it watchable yet but a massive difference all the same. The Ubuntu default build of Mplayer and X264 seems to be none CPU specific and suffer heavily for it - as a few other people have reported where MPlayer plays a file fine on Debian but not on Ubuntu.

Using the -framedrop option now shows a regularly changing picture keeping up with the audio rather than just blackness because it can't keep up at all. Without the -framedrop option the slow motion isn't anything like as bad.

Next step - put coreavc into the middle of it and see what happens.

I'll take a look at shifting to other containers as well. For now at least that wouldn't really bother me - once the download is done the downloader kicks a script that does a load of other stuff including renaming and appropriately filing AVIs downloaded so it probably wouldn't take much to extend it to automatically shifting stuff contained in mkvs into another container.

Thanks again for all of the help on this!