Fortunately, one of the best movie player for Linux today - MPlayer - is a command line driven application perfectly suited for our demands. It is highly configurable and almost universal player - when some file can not be played in MPlayer there are good chances that it can not be played at all. Just don't forget to install additional codecs (package named "w32codecs" in Debian) that adds support for most popular video and audio formats. Also, install additional Microsoft fonts (package "msttcorefonts") if you need to watch movies with subtitles in language other than English.
Of course, since MPlayer has only command-line GUI, we'll need some file browser that will pick files to play and call MPlayer in full screen passing him selected files on command line. Unfortunately, for that task I was unable to find satisfactory solution: all graphical file browsers for Linux are either highly cluttered with desktop-oriented GUI elements (Nautilus, Konqueror) or highly unconfigurable (all the others). For now, I'm using as simplified as possible version of Krusader (viewing in just one pane, most of the GUI elements removed), but much simpler file browser is needed here. One that just displays directory listing, nothing else, and has configurable key bindings for both folders and files.
