Hi, I have a slackware computer plugged into my TV so I can use it as a DVD player. Right now I run Gnome and just use Totem or xine to play the movies, but I will be reinstalling and wanted to not include any X server to save on space, so I wanted to run MPlayer from the command line.

I downloaded the source from the Mplayer website and ran:
./configure
make
make install

all as root. The thing installed with a few warnings as it scrolled past. A few things I am having trouble with:
-I cannot run it as a user, only as root.
-I only played one file, an episode of House in avi format, and every so often the bottom half would flicker a bit.

The computer is a P4 1.6 and have a GeForce FX5500 in it, with the nVidia drivers installed.

Any help with getting this resolved would be much appriciated.

The nvidia drivers won't be too much help as they're for X11, try 'mplayer -vo help' and play with the different available outputs and see which gives the best results. I've found the SDL output works well from outside X.

OK, I will try that now, any idea about letting users run mplayer, not just root?