Getting mostly-decent DVD performance on an old laptop without XVideo

I recently got an old laptop to run Ubuntu Linux on. The specs are as follows:

IBM Thinkpad A30
Intel(R) Pentium(R) III Mobile CPU 1133MHz
ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M6 LY Video card

Sadly, this laptop doesn't have working XVideo. The XVideo extension is listed in xdpyinfo, and mplayer seems to think everything is fine, but the dga, sdl and xv drivers in mplayer all give a solid blue window instead of playing the movie.

I found a bunch of people with the same complaint, and some folks were able to fix it with xvattr or by adjusting their X server extensions in xorg.conf. In my case, these didn't work.

Despite this, I've found I'm able to use the following small script to get mostly-decent DVD playback on this lowend laptop. It'll assume you want to use sdl without hardware acceleration if you have a $DISPLAY (if you're in your X server), or svgalib if you're on a virtual console without X:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -x

filename="$1"

#mplayer -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1:fast:skiploopfilter=all -framedrop -vo x11 -zoom "1" -cache 16384 -cache-min 25 -ao alsa "$filename" > /dev/null >>&1

# this one's pretty decent, but it loses a lot of frames
# when a lot is changing
#mplayer -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts fast:skiploopfilter=all -vo x11 -zoom "1" -cache 16384 -cache-min 25 -ao alsa "$filename"

# blue window
#mplayer -vo sdl -zoom "1" -cache 16384 -cache-min 25 -ao alsa "$filename"

# blue window
#mplayer -vo sdl:forcexv -zoom "1" -cache 16384 -cache-min 25 -ao alsa "$filename"

# this plays something, but it's boggy
#mplayer -vo sdl:nohwaccel -cache 16384 -cache-min 25 -ao alsa "$filename"

# No output
#mplayer -vo dga -zoom "1" -cache 16384 -cache-min 25 -ao alsa "$filename"

# blue window
#mplayer -vo xv -zoom "1" -cache 16384 -cache-min 25 -ao alsa "$filename"

# error
#mplayer -vo opengl -cache 16384 -cache-min 25 -ao alsa "$filename"

if [ "$DISPLAY" = "" ]
then
        video=svga
else
	video=sdl:nohwaccel
fi

mplayer -framedrop -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts fast:skiploopfilter=all -vo $video -cache 16384 -cache-min 25 -ao alsa "$filename"