I'm very new with Linux and have had SUSE linux 9.2 for a few days now. I decided to get an media player and I had heard that MPlayer was a very good media player for almost all types of video media. I tried installing it and followed the instructions. When it didn't work at first I tried putting the codecs in both usr/local/lib/codecs/ and usr/local/lib/win32 and it still doesn't work. Then, I tried using a SUSE rpm package that I found a link to on MPlayer's web site and that gave me some problem about needing the win32-all codec... but I have downloaded the 'all' codecs and the 'essential' codecs and extracted both of them into both the usr/local/lib/codecs/ and usr/local/lib/win32. At the moment I'm stumped as to what to try next.

how about if you tell us what isn't working about it... we're not psychic.

also those win32 codecs are purely optional. they do not make up the core of mplayer's functionality

I think this will be a smarter question...
I'm having trouble compiling the latest version of MPlayer (MPlayer v1.0pre5 source)
I used the following ./configure to point the installer towards the file with the essential codecs I downloaded:
./configure --with-codecsdir=file:/home/gavin/Documents/essential

When I ran the 'make' command with root access I got the following message at the end of compiling.

In file included from /usr/include/linux/list.h:7,
from ../osdep/kerneltwosix.h:5,
from vo_fbdev.c:21:
/usr/include/linux/prefetch.h: In function `prefetch_range':
/usr/include/linux/prefetch.h:64: error: `CONFIG_X86_L1_CACHE_SHIFT' undeclared(first use in this function)
/usr/include/linux/prefetch.h:64: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
/usr/include/linux/prefetch.h:64: error: for each function it appears in.)
make[1]: *** [vo_fbdev.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/gavin/Documents/MPlayer-1.0pre5/libvo'
make: *** [libvo/libvo.a] Error 2

As it's pretty obvious I'm new to linux and am not sure what this means, except that it would not compile correctly.

Did a google search on the first line of the error message and came up with some threads and one suggested adding --disable-fbdev to the ./configure line. After adding this the make and the make install worked fine.