How to start a video from command line or menu?

[joe at actionline.com]

> From: joe at actionline.com
>> 'gmplayer' is not found on my system or in synaptic.
>> 'xine' also is not found, although a lot of packages
>> with 'xine' in the names are found, but I can't tell
>> which ones would be the main 'xine' program.
>
> That's really weird, unless the mplayer people have changed the names of
> things again, or made it so that "mplayer --gui" now does what "gmplayer"
> used
> to do.
>
> But xine is separated into xine-ui and xine-lib.  The idea was that the
> codecs
> would probably change a lot more often than the UI code, so there would be
> fewer updates if the packages were separated.  Running "apt-get install
> xine-ui" should install the xine-lib dependencies unless this distro has
> really messed up their dependency tracking.  (Not sure why anyone would
> install xine-aa, though....)


mplayer --gui video.wmv ... did not work for me.

I was able to install xine-ui from synaptic, but it makes terrible noises
when running (like very loud white-noise).

mplayer works fine, except it opens a huge terminal window with a log of
lines of technical info scrolling while the video runs. Is there any way
to make that terminal window not open (or resize it very small) while
keeping the video window the main attraction?