Back in the day around libva 1.0.7 mplayer with libva patches didn't compile against that library hence the idea that those libraries are completely different. mplayer snapshot from 22 of march did compile now against libva 1.0.14

although updated patchset against recent code would be welcomed

Maybe inclusion into master is possible?
gstreamer-vaapi didn't compile. Problem however was not vaapi itself but recent version of ffmpeg 0.8.2. gstreamer-vaapi would need to be updated to work with that library. Against older library it did compile just fine