wow, it almost makes me regret dumping windows.

MPlayer loads my videos and starts playing them, but no aspect ratio or fullscreen options will cause the picture to get any bigger or smaller. Maybe I'm just missing something simple there.

I know something's wrong when I start MPlayer and it tells me:

"ERROR! New_Face failed. Maybe the font path is wrong. Please supply the text font file (~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf) "

On top of that, and worst of all, MPlayer won't provide any sound to go with the relatively tiny picture it's providing me. I thought the Synaptic installs were supposed to go smoothly for new Ubuntu users!

Ya know, it's just my opinion but I've never been a big fan of MPlayer either. It has never worked correctly for me now matter how hard I try to solve the problem. I've dumped using it all together. There are many other players out there that have similar abilities of MPlayer. I use Xine and I don't have any problems with it at all. I hope this helps!

My guess is that you're using the x11 video out device (-vo x11). Try, as a temporary measure 'mplayer -vo xv VIDEOFILE'.

I'm guessing that would solve one or two of the problems. I went and got xine and it works perfectly for a .avi file I tried. This program is great- looks good and works. It simply quits when I try to run mpg, but hopefully some tinkering will solve that one. If someone knows what's going on, let me know, though. Thanks, Centinul!

nevermind, mpgs work just as good as avi! Reccomend this program to anyone using ubuntu, it looks good and works. Centinul (or anyone), you seem to know the media players... any reccomendations for a media player with a good library to keep track of a lot of music? I used to use windows media, actually, over winamp etc, as much as I used open-source on windows before the switch. I just liked it all huge and feature-packed.

I use a fairly light mp3 player called XMMS for my MP3 needs so I can really only speak for that. XMMS is essentially a winamp clone, it has a very light memory footprint and handles my 1200+ mp3/FLAC/ogg collection very easily. There are other very feature packed music players out there. One that comes to mind first is amaroK. I've never used it but it has gotten rave reviews from it's users. It is a KDE based app, but you should be able to install it in a Gnome environment still as long as you have the proper libraries. A Gnome based audio player that gets a lot of praise is Rhythmbox. Again I've never used it so I can't speak for it but give it a shot. Those are the few that come to mind, try them all and see what ones u like