pros/cons of installing from source

[yag <josec.rodriguez@gmail.com>]

Hi

I would like to know whether installing from source rather than 
from the repositories has any advantage in terms of performance or 
something else. I didn't notice any difference when comparing 
mplayer's behavior, although compiling it myself gave me the choice 
of fine tuning the available codecs as well as installing the very 
latest version, for instance.

Thanks