Before we switched to using mpv (probably in the first Jessie-based release?),
we used the VAAPI-enabled version of mplayer instead.
These are re-packs of the unofficial Ubuntu DEBs from the
https://launchpad.net/~sander-vangrieken/+archive/ubuntu/vaapi PPA.
The only thing we did was change "libpulse0 (>= 1:0.99.1)" to
"libpulse0 (>= 0.99.1)" in the control file, since Debian's libpulse0 package
lacks a generation number.