[MPlayer-users] Best way to play HDTV MPEG2 TS streams with MPlayer?

[Steven Ellis]

Found some Transport Stream MPEG 2 files on the net recently that are HD
resolution and wondered whats the best way to play these. As they are too
large for my monitor i've tried

mplayer -x 720 -y 400 file.ts

but that doesn't work too well. Then I tried

mplayer -vf scale=720x400 file.ts

which produces a properly scaled result but hammers the hell out of my
Athlon XP 2k+ and won't play the video properly.

In the end I used mencoder to drop the file to a 720x400 based huffyuv
which plays perfecty but its double the size of the origional MPEG-TS
stream.

So

1. Whats the minimum spec for playing HD streams under Linux?

2. Recommendations on the best way to play these streams

3. What do I do about trying to play this full screen? I want to scale
horizontal and keep the aspect ration correct.

Steve