I did the typical install for mplayer and I've been having some trouble with it. If I try to open it from KDE it has no gui. And if I try to use "open with..." to play an avi with it, it will play the audio, but with no video and again no gui. this was the result when I went into the terminal and typed

mplayer /mnt/Windows/unzipped/My Files/Video/16.avi -vo xv

MPlayer 1.0pre1-3.2.2 (C) 2000-2003 MPlayer Team

CPU: Intel Pentium 4 Northwood (Family: 8, Stepping: 9)
Detected cache-line size is 64 bytes
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 SSE SSE2

Reading config file /usr/local/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf: No such file or directory
Reading config file /home/pathian/.mplayer/config
Reading /home/pathian/.mplayer/codecs.conf: Can't open '/home/pathian/.mplayer/codecs.conf': No such file or directory
Reading /usr/local/etc/mplayer/codecs.conf: Can't open '/usr/local/etc/mplayer/codecs.conf': No such file or directory
Using built-in default codecs.conf
font: can't open file: /home/pathian/.mplayer/font/font.desc
font: can't open file: /usr/local/share/mplayer/font/font.desc
Linux RTC init error in ioctl (rtc_irqp_set 1024): Permission denied
Try adding "echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq" to your system startup scripts.
Using usleep() timing
Can't open input config file /home/pathian/.mplayer/input.conf: No such file or directory
Can't open input config file /usr/local/etc/mplayer/input.conf: No such file or directory
Falling back on default (hardcoded) input config

Playing /mnt/Windows/unzipped/My
File not found: '/mnt/Windows/unzipped/My'
Failed to open /mnt/Windows/unzipped/My


Playing Files/Video/16.avi
File not found: 'Files/Video/16.avi'
Failed to open Files/Video/16.avi


I am using Redhat 9 by the way. I also went searching for mplayer's codec and skins directory, but I found that they were nowhere on my system. There was no error displayed when I installed it though. I also found that mplayer itself isn't installed into its own directory, the mplayer executable is sitting in my /usr/local/bin directory. could someone tell me what I need to do so that I can finally be able to play videomedia from linux?

try to put the file location into "" it contains spaces and mplayer (and all linux commands) treats spaces as command line arguments separation, to avoid it you can either escape spaces with \ or use double quotes
P.S. and to instruct mplayer to play certain video files you must compile it with the appropriate support for these types of files there are mplayer codecs available at the motehr site of mplayer ( http://www.mplayerhq.hu ) you can extrac them into /usr/lib/win32 and during mplayer ./configure step first run
./configure --help
to see what is available for you - it is quite a lot, so you might want to pipe the output to less/more)

For mplayer, I type 'gmplayer' and I get the GUI with all the options.
Does that work for you?