Compiling from source is a bit much for me when it comes to getting my hands dirty, so I opted to install Mplayer from an unofficial binary. (Which I got using urpmi.) Trouble is, movies will often give me picture but no sound. (So far Quicktime files such as .mp4 are notorious for this.) I downloaded the codecs from the Mplayer website and put them in the usr/lib/codecs directory as the README said, but to no avail. Still no sound. How might I remedy this situation? As I said I haven't gotten into source compilation yet, so the codecs were added after Mplayer was already installed. Do I hafta tell it where to look for the codecs? Or did I do something in the wrong order?

ALSO: I can't find DIVX/XVID codecs anywhere for Linux. If those might help, where can I get them? (The divx website's linux page was down last few times I looked...)

If you haven't already done so goto http://easyurpmi.zarb.org and setup the software sources. The codecs packages are win32-codecs and real-codecs and you can get them through urpmi.

I already got the thing under Core Distribution, "Source contrib." But when I search those codec things in the mandrake control center, they can't be found. Which of the repositories on easyurpmi would I need for those? Aside from jpackage having something to do with java, I have no idea what the other repositories listed are for...

Get main, plf-free and plf-nonfree. Main is the full repo of software from Mandriva - you only get a fraction of it on the 3 download CDs. PLF includes stuff that can't be put in the main repo for legal reasons - eg. video codecs and dvd playing.

Awesome. It worked. urpmi rawks my face in more ways than I initially imagined. Thanks huge for the help.