Playing videos with Xv worked well for me on Linux in early 2000s. I can't never get proper hw-accelerated video to play without bogging CPU down on my Linux laptops anymore (Thinkpads with Intel low-voltage CPUs).
I was more a FreeBSD person at the time, slutty to try various things, but 2000s think pads and FreeBSD just worked at some point and never changed that system. Used OSX otherwise. Printers were the other Linux/OS X usage gap.
That said, In the mid 2000s, Linux was better but still had issues getting video/etc configured properly (depending on what you wanted to do/your hardware). I specifically moved to OS X because video just worked.