I thought I would try to do this. But I've got stuck very early on. I've downloaded 4 tar.bz2 files from mplayer, the player, codecs, fonts and a skin. I've untarred the player and the codecs. All were downloaded to my home directory. The problem is when I try ./configure it just says bash: no such file etc. The files are coloured blue in my home directory, I was wondering if that meant anything.

Blue-colored 'files' are actually directories. You have to cd into them first.
Oh, and don't forget to do ./configure --enable-gui, otherwise you'll have to recompile.

[simon@localhost ~]$ cd /usr/local/src
[simon@localhost src]$ ls
essential-20050412/
[simon@localhost src]$ cd /essential-20050412
bash: cd: /essential-20050412: No such file or directory
[simon@localhost src]$ cd /essential-20050412/
bash: cd: /essential-20050412/: No such file or directory
[simon@localhost src]$ cd essential-20050412/
[simon@localhost essential-20050412]$ ./configure
bash: ./configure: No such file or directory
[simon@localhost essential-20050412]$

So here I've eventually managed to cd into the essentials directory located in /usr/local/src/essential-20050412/ and get bash. What am I doing wrong?

You don't do anything to the essentials package. All you need to do is mv or cp the codecs to the appropriate directory. Before you do anything else, cd into the mplayer directory where you unzipped everything and read the README file that's in there. That tells you what you need to do. There are also help files in .html that has lots of info on it. Easiest way to view those is open your browser and type / in the address bar. Then click the folder icons until you get to the .html files. And don't forget about mplayer.com. The help files are posted there as well I believe.

Yes I'd read those fairly thoroughly. Anyway, I got it to configure, before making I just wanted to check a few things. I opted for GUI but it failed due to lack of GTK devel tools. I installed all the development stuff when I installed Mandriva and I'm not too sure what I'm looking for in RPMDrake install. It would be nice but not essential to have a GUI. Somethings missing anyway. Also quite a few things aren't enabled but I'm not going to go into that.

I really would suggest installing the GTK dev tools. It might take a while, but it's required for a lot of things besides mplayer.

Do you happen to know what the files are called. I did a search and nothing called GTK devel or similar came up. There was one called kdevelop. Thanks.

Edit. GTKwave-devel is all I can find. Perhaps it doesn't come with the mandrake disk but I'd be surprised.

you miss the relative vs full pathname
if you want to change to essential-20050412 from /usr/local/src you do
not cd /essential-20050412
you machine has no record of a folder
/essential-20050412
but it does have a record of /usr/local/src/essential-20050412
so no matter where you are you can always
cd /usr/local/src/essential-20050412

compiling -- something as complex as mplayer sometimes requires commonly used patches and requires a pretty advanced knowledge of the package and how it works.

i think you need to consult "Beyond Linux from Scratch" current cvs compiling instructions for mplayer

It's working now without gui. Thanks for your help.