I have seen many people struggling to get the MPlayer working in GNU/Linux and the following is a simplified guide for these people, it worked for me. Follow this method in any disto, it should work, unless of course if you don’t have the basic resources like make, gcc and etc.

Before you install MPlayer, it asks for either DivX or XVid codec (not sure if they are available in you distro) else fetch it from http://www.xvid.org/ and http://download.divx.com/labs/ divx611-20060201-gcc4.0.1.tar.gz. Just install them both so you can use both of them. First install these two, so mplayer can support these codecs as well. It’s not a big deal to install these codecs.

DivX has a shell script called install.sh just run it using ./install.sh command. By the way, to extract a tar.gx or a tgx file, use the following command tar –xzvf file_name.tar.gx To extract a tar.bx2 file or a tbz file use the following command.

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tar –xjvf file_name_here.tar.bz2

for xvid codec uncompress it and go to that directory and in that, go to build/generic
and then do the following

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./configure
make
make install

Then download MPlay from the following link http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/MPlayer-1.0pre8.tar.bz2.

Then start installing MPlayer. uncompress it using this command.

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Go into that directory that it creates and execute the following command.
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Note: If you don’t use –enable-gui option it will not compile it to enable the GUI skin, so make sure to include this option.
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./configure –enable-gui

Now execute the following two commands.

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make
make install

Then install a font Copy a *.ttf file form any ware to the /user/local/share/mplayer/ directory and rename it to subfont.ttf.

Then install a skin. Download any skin from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/Skin/ and then make a director inside /user/local/share/mplayer/ calles skins. Copy the skin (.tar.bz2 file) into the newly created directory and uncompress it. Then rename the skin (the name of the directory which was created by uncompress process) that you want to appear as the default skin for Mplayer, to default. Then you can play music and movies. Use gmplayer file_name.mp3 in a terminal or you can set file association and then use it like any other player you are already familiar with.

Have fun!!!

Dharshin.