Mplayer Variant Help

[EmmGunn]

Hi All,
I'm looking at the different variants for mplayer and most of them are  
self explanatory, but I have a couple of questions.  I noticed this in  
the port file:

83	# configure is not autoconf
84	universal_variant no

which I took to mean that a universal variant is not available, but  
then I see a binary_codecs variant which has something about powerpc  
and i386.  What does this do exactly?  Is this something equivalent to  
a universal variant?  I was hoping to compile a universal build of  
mplayer.

Also, just out of curiosity, what are the darwin and darwin_8  
variants.  I couldn't find anything about them either.  Thanks in  
advance for any help.

-Mike