after RTFM, here's a bug report.
symptom: the movie starts to play, but only the first image is displayed, it doesn't do anything afterwards. the movei in question is THE_SECOND_RENAISSANCE_1_large.mov downloadable from http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/index_anime.html
Yes, this is definitely a known bug. Someone else mentioned a patch you can use to get the movie to play, so start there. However, there is one other problem... the large and small versions of the Animatrix1 (NOT the medium one!) splits the audio into two parts, with aid 1 and 2. BUT, mplayer only knows how to play one track at a time. In particular, it always selects the largest audio and video track. As a result, the first chunk of audio, about 10 seconds worth, won't get played, and the audio sync for the movie will be off ~10 seconds. So, the easiest solution is this (assuming you really want to watch the large version :): Grab the medium version of the animatrix1 and dump the audio to wave as follows: mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm -aofile soundtrack.wav medium.mov Then, use the wav file as the sound track for the large version as follows: mplayer -audiofile soundtrack.wav large.mov Note that you'll have to wait a while in both cases... first, for it to decode, then for mplayer to scan the WAV. :) Of course, if you don't care about watching the medium one, just do that... it should work quite nicely with A'rpi's patch. Brett.