At least that is what I can figure out from looking at the website:
http://www.mplayer2.org/
So I fiddled around with changing the latest unstable mplayer-mt
package to mplayer2, with success. Some observations:
A custom mplayer.conf is no longer necessary, since
mplayer-mt/mplayer2 determines the number of cores and spawns a
matching number of threads for codecs that support parallel decoding
automatically.
Also, since mencoder is no longer built, this means most codec -dev
packages are not needed, since only mencoder called them for external
transcoding, the mplayer binary using internal versions for playback.
Uninstalled and disabled:
liba52-0.7.4-dev libdirac-dev libfaad-dev libmad0-dev
libschroedinger-dev libspeex-dev libtheora-dev libtwolame-dev
libvorbis-dev libvpx-dev libfaac-dev libbsb2-dev libx264-dev
libmp3lame-dev
and mplayer2 still works for all playback of all those codecs. This
raises the possiblilty that it could meet DFSG and make it into the
main Debian repository.
However, I still use the stable mencoder-mt, copied to "mencoder", for
transcoding with Devede, since it does not "burn in" soft subtitles
from .mkv files like the standard mencoder does. (and the vanilla
Debian mencoder can transcode to mpeg2, which I thought was still
patent encumbered)
