Since Workstation 5.0 VMware introduces capability to record a virtual machine activitity in an AVI video. Unfortunately recording codec is proprietary and playback is impossible with common media players on machines where Workstation is not installed.

Now Philip Langdale, a VMware engineer, reveals the video codec used in Workstation is a customized VNC session record and informs MPlayer developers found a way to reverse it.

So now to play a virtual machine movie on a computer without VMware Workstation you'll just need last version of Mplayer and this codec.