Alternatives are good, so probably libmad will be enabled in the next build of garage mplayer. But libmad has problems with audio/video sync on playing some video files, so it is not very useful for video. And also ffmp3 is potentially a lot faster than libmad if optimized for armv5te (right now it does not have any assembly optimizations except for a few minor macros vs. extensive armv4 assembly optimization of libmad). On x86 desktop PC, ffmp3 can run circles around libmad I initially evaluated the possibility of doing some armv5te optimizations for ffmp3, but getting nokia dsp mp3 decoder to work with mplayer made it less important at that time. So what we have now is that unoptimized ffmp3 decoder is about 20% slower than libmad on Nokia 770 (at least my benchmarks showed this difference).

ALSA support is a bit more difficult as OS2006 does not have ALSA preinstalled.