I have recently installed CentOS 4.3 (a.k.a.- unbranded Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4), and I want to play some movies on it. however, I cannot get the inbuilt players to work after installing the w32codecs package I found in rpmfind.net. There are no other movie players that I can find in the standars software repository. What should I do to make the movies play?

mplayer is relatively simple to install following the readme, requires glib-1.2 gtk+-1.2 and libtiff libdvdread and libdvd-css are also helpful, but if there is already a movieplayer on your computer you should probably have a couple of these packages. make sure to read the README file that comes with mplayer or you'll likely end up without a gui interface...

It's funny that you posted this, because I just installed mplayer it took about an hour with all dependencies.

Did you try to compile from source? Because when I downloaded the RPM from the mPlayer site, I got this list of dependancy errors:

==========
libXvMCW.so.1 is needed by mplayer-1.0-0.20.pre7.2.el4.rf.i386
libaa.so.1 is needed by mplayer-1.0-0.20.pre7.2.el4.rf.i386
libdvdread.so.3 is needed by mplayer-1.0-0.20.pre7.2.el4.rf.i386
liblirc_client.so.0 is needed by mplayer-1.0-0.20.pre7.2.el4.rf.i386
liblzo.so.1 is needed by mplayer-1.0-0.20.pre7.2.el4.rf.i386
libmad.so.0 is needed by mplayer-1.0-0.20.pre7.2.el4.rf.i386
libmp3lame.so.0 is needed by mplayer-1.0-0.20.pre7.2.el4.rf.i386
libxvidcore.so.4 is needed by mplayer-1.0-0.20.pre7.2.el4.rf.i386
mplayer-fonts is needed by mplayer-1.0-0.20.pre7.2.el4.rf.i386
==========

I've already installed a w32codecs RPM, so I'm not sure what to do about all ofthis stuff.

For the fonts, I downloaded a font package from the mPlayer website, but it's just a bzip2 file, and I don't know what to do with the contents.

Yes, I installed from source, and like I said it is relatively simple. You shouldn't need any of the fonts from the mplayer site if you already have true type fonts installed on your computer. pre7 is old anyways, you should be installing pre8. (Why you would need liblirc_client for mplayer I have no clue. It would just be a lot easier to follow the installation instructions in the README file for source installation.

just make sure you have the --with-gui(or whatever mplayer states is the correct flag for such) on your ./configure line or you will have to recompile if you want a non terminal mplayer.