I used to play videos with the framebuffer just fine and read PDF's with fbpdf2, among watching TV with fbtv and the like. I didn't miss nearly anything, as most games under SDL1/2 can render into FB with

      export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=fbcon 

or

      export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=kmsdrm

And tons of games too, such as Supertux2, Crispy Doom, SDLQuake, FreeCiv-SDL...