Oh yes, I'm not knocking its abilities, it's just that it doesn't come installed as standard, nor does mplayer, and mplayer is better than the built-in video player afaik.

It would be interesting to know how TCPMP is so fast on your old Palm hardware (cpu speed? HW video accel?). There is source for TCPMP before it became Core Player (what ever happened to the promised open source Betaplayer?), might be worth a look to see if there are any improvements/optimisations for mplayer.