Before I spend hours screwing around with Mplayer and Xine -- some advice please ?

[William Case]

Hi;

I am running F8 and have downloaded and installed both Xine and Mplayer.
Xine( and totem I suppose) keeps taking over as default.

With previous Fedora versions I just uninstalled Xine to get Mplayer
working, however this time I thought I might try to get Xine going.  The
front end gui looks attractive and Firefox about: seems to be saying all
the codecs are there. 

However, the first problem is there seems to be no Xine help
documentation.  I am willing to do the exploratory work and climb the
learning curve.  But before I begin and fruitlessly waste a lot of time,
if anyone has some tips, hints or experience using one or the other of
Xine or Mplayer, I would appreciate a short post.

I know there is lots of info and previous posts on this subject, but
before I even go there, is it worth it?  Or should I just eliminate Xine
and use Mplayer?

-- 
Regards Bill