Video without X.

I just manage to make mplayer run in a framebuffer as in no graphical environment.
What I did. 

It is still a bit primitive as I only just got it up.
But the basic steps I took (which I think you should be able to mimic to your system), were


links
tar xvpf
cd
./configure
make
su
make install


Well with all this done. now you just need to make sure you have framebuffer support on your system.
slackware gets it by default (else you need to configure your lilo.conf or grub.conf)
I got best result for svgalib for video playback.
I can do this to run video

su
mplayer -vo svga -ao alsa