Trying to keep the quality of the video, I’ve noticed a growing popularity of Matroska codec pack for anime releases. Most of the video players do not support mkv format from the box, however you can download VLC player which can do it.
Otherwise, for not creating a mess in your “video & sound” category, it’d be easier just to apt-get few extra packages needed for playing most of anime movies:
sudo apt-get install libebml-dev
sudo apt-get install libmatroska-dev
sudo apt-get install libmp4v2-0 libmp4v2-dev
sudo apt-get install libmatroska-dev
sudo apt-get install libmp4v2-0 libmp4v2-dev
So you can easily run your matroska files on MPlayer or Movie Player. For VLC compilation of Matroska codecs, you can check out a full installation guide. However, the quality of playing the videos on VLC in Windows platform was better then in VLC under Linux.
Maybe, someone can advice some other solutions except writting own video drivers? 