Playing Video On Desktop

I've been screwing around with MPlayer for a bit today. Specifically, I was trying to configure it to display on the desktop rather than a movable window.

I found a couple things worth noting:
1) if you don't have hw support you won't be able to apply it to your background nor scale it. Check for xv support by issuing the 'xvinfo' command. I found I didn't have the proper driver configured and therefore had to tweak my xorg.conf
2) The required command to scale the video up (in my case) isn't intuitive.

I had success with the following command:

$ mplayer -vf scale=1024:720 -rootwin DesiresAndDiversions.mpg

Cheers.