If you downloaded any proprietary CODECs, extract them at some system-wide location (like /usr/lib/mplayer/codecs) and add --with-codecsdir=[location] option to the configure script. The package maintainers recommend building without any optimizations. Install MPlayer by running the following commands: ./configure --prefix=/usr --confdir=/etc/mplayer \ --enable-largefiles --enable-shared-pp && make && make install && make -C libavcodec/libpostproc install You will need codecs.conf only if you want to change its properties, as the main binary contains an internal copy of it: cp etc/codecs.conf /etc/mplayer The GUI version of MPlayer requires a skin. Extract the default one at recommended location: tar xjvf ../default-1.7.tar.bz2 -C /usr/share/mplayer/Skin 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.