What it is: This project is a media player for *nix systems. It was designed for Linux, but works on other unices like: FreeBSD, QNX. It was designed for x86 architecture but was ported on DecAlpha, SUN, PowerPC. Not a long ago it was ported on MS Windows too! Please see FAQs for detailed instruction for how to compile and use MPlayerXP on MS Windows.

Why: This project was born because we disagree with Arpad Gereoffy (the guy who developed mplayer since 2000) in the question of multi and single threaded cores of player. He is against of threading technology. I am not.
In this connection: I have no goal to compete with mplayer in general. I just want to do this branch because it works better for me, and I would be glad if it will work (better) for you.

The future: This branch is mplayer with applied extra performance patch (which was rejected by Arpi). I going to change infrastructure of the project and make it more lightweight, flexible and modular. Also I want to develop it in the multithreaded way. But these changes have nothing common with total rewrite of the core and other integral parts of THE PLAYER.
So it is a successor of mplayer but not completely different project.

Also, I have no plans to include mencoder in the future packages. Indeed it can be improved in multithreaded way too, but I'm not a mencoder's developer, I'm even not a mencoder's user. But if there are volunteers to do this job then I will not be against!