mplayer codecs
 

do the codecs have to be installed before mplayer? can i just uncompress them into a folder or is there no way around uninstalling and reinstalling

i tried renaming the essential folder win32 and put it in /usr/lib, which didn't work and my error is the same as before

error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device

when i type mplayer -vo x11 <movie>.mov it plays ok. can anyone tell me how to change the mplayer config file to fix this??? does anyone have mplayer?????????????

you can get good codecs by installing libavcodec (before you install mplayer). It supports most types of video (decoding only) and the performance is very good. To checkout libavcodec, type

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@mplayerhq.hu:/cvsroot/ffmpeg co login
(press enter when asked for a password)
cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous@mplayerhq.hu:/cvsroot/ffmpeg co ffmpeg

I'm not sure how binary distributions of mplayer deal with codecs, but if you're installing from scource, copy the 'libavcodec' directory from the ffmpeg source to the 'main' directory of the mplayer source. Compile should detect it there.

"error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device"
this is not a codec problem as far as I can tell. Open ~/.mplayer/config in your editor of choice and go to the line that begins with
vo=
and change it to
vo=x11
or whatever it needs to be.

oops, the smiley's shouldn't be there. Replace each smiley with a colon followed by a p :P