Like good wine age sometimes make a better product.
And ffplay and ffmpeg on linux and other platforms has been through many rounds of rewrites and optimizations.
I tried to build just a straight player using just libavcodec and opengl, and all though the framerate is decent, never really got the audio conversion and synch to work as well as ffplay.
The ffplay mods are complete - Life in The Clouds
The one problem I had with ffplay though was sdl, combining the uikit and sdl was not all that easy.
I had to figure out how to do that first, and posted this .
SDL :: View topic - Combine coaca and sdl on the iphone - it does work!
All you have to do is create both the sdl_window and your application's window and they take turns becoming key windows.