We have plugged the board into a VGA monitor and redirecting output to tty0 (and it appears on the monitor). However, after 10 minutes or so, the tty seems to ''freeze'' (probably a timeout from no key-presses), and the cursor disappears

Some console codes that might be useful while using mplayer or gstreamer or other applications over the framebuffer device:

Turn cursor off:
# echo -e ''\033[?25l'' >/dev/tty0

Turn cursor on:
# echo -e ''\033[?25h'' >/dev/tty0

Disable console blanking:
# echo -e "\033[9;0]" >/dev/tty0