To me, the only way to use an up-to-date mplayer is to compile it yourself on your machine (by using one of the AUR packages).

Making a binary mplayer package is very difficult and the result can't be perfect for everybody because you have to make choices about what will be enabled in it (and add deps) and what will not (but some users might want it). It's the prototype of the package that should stay source-based if possible.

That may be so, but there are binary packages available. And while that is the case, they should be updated every so often. I mean, ffmpeg is almost 6 months old and it's tied to revision 14236 - the current revision is 16380! We are 2000 commits behind, it's astounding.

Not to mention I recently ran up into a bug where ffmpeg causes mpd to crash, and it's because the package is so out-dated. And there are other bug reports as well, dealing with other crashes and broken ogg support:

http://bugs.archlinux.org/index.php?string=ffmpeg&project=1

So the question remains, will these packages be updated anytime soon?

Back to your point about it being difficult to package - while I realize there are resource implications to this suggestion, I think the goal would be to have a couple different binary packages available to hit the most common uses, like is done with some other packages. I wouldn't throw up my hands and resort to compiling from source. Any idea how long it takes to compile mplayer on a p3? Trust me, it's not fun.

Scott