The package maintainers recommend building without any optimization Install MPlayer by running the following commands: install -d /usr/lib/mplayer/extralite && tar xjvf ../extralite.tar.bz2 -C /usr/lib/mplayer && ./configure --prefix=/usr --confdir=/etc/mplayer --enable-largefiles \ --enable-gui --enable-menu --enable-shared-pp \ --with-codecsdir=/usr/lib/mplayer/extralite && make && make install && cp etc/codecs.conf /etc/mplayer && tar xjvf ../default-1.7.tar.bz2 -C /usr/share/mplayer/Skin If freetype is in use, the only advantage of prerendered fonts is that they are faster. Install them like this: tar xjvf ../font-arial-iso-8859-1.tar.bz2 -C /usr/share/mplayer/font If you want DVD playback with MPlayer, you need to make a link from your DVD drive to /dev/dvd: ln -s /dev/<dvd drive> /dev/dvd Replace <dvd drive> with whatever device is appropriate, for example /dev/hdc. if you don't know which device to choose, type: dmesg | grep DVD It should result in an output like: hdc: Pioneer DVD-ROM ATAPIModel DVD-114 0110, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive If you have SCSI-Emulation activated for the drives, you'll need to get the right SCSI-device. Every CD/DVD-ROM drive is mapped in the same order as in IDE to the devices named /dev/scd0, /dev/scd1 and so on.