How to enable hardware acceleration of video decoding in mplayer with Intel HD3000 on Vivid?

Solution 1:

OK, I found mpv (a fork of mplayer) which does everything I wanted and carried all the good UI qualities from mplayer2.

To enable vaapi support, run it with mpv --vo=opengl-hq --hwdec=vaapi file.mkv

or add

vo=opengl-hq
hwdec=vaapi

to ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf.

Previously the answer suggested using vo=vaapi and hwdec=vaapi but this is not a recommended setup anymore. See comments.