unofficial mplayer - HowTo

[Christoph Georgi]

Yes, those problems with the merrilat-mplayer are pretty old. You cannot 
install that package under Warty.

However, it is really not a big problem to compile mplayer, even if one 
is not an developer or packager, although one might not be adviced to do 
so, especially cause it's hard to get rid of mplayer once installed.

Here's a small HowTo for the desperate:

1. Download the source code from mplayerhq.hu including the essential 
codec package, a skin, and a font package.

2. Untar the Essential Codecs to /usr/local/lib/codecs and the MPlayer 
code in /opt

3. Install the following packages using Synaptic:
gcc-3.3, gcc-3.4, libx11-dev, libpng, libpng10-dev, libpng12-dev, 
libgtk1.2-dev
(You might require less, with those packages it works fine..)

4. In a Terminal change to the /opt/MPlayer-1.0pre5 directory and run
	$ sudo ./configure --enable-gui

5. $ sudo make

6. $ sudo make install

7. Untar the Skin to /usr/local/share/mplayer/Skin/default

8. Untar the Font package and copy the content of the directory with the 
appropriate font-size to /home/<user>/.mplayer/font

9. Start the MPlayer with gmplayer. You can also cerate a launcher..

That should work out fine as it did for me, but (of cause) I cannot 
guarantee..

christoph