Well I tried mplayer installation via yum got it working (somewhat) but the plugin for mozilla crashed constantly.
Tried to find newer version of mplayerplugin but only found fedora, of course.

I'm thinking about trying xine. Any advice?
Is one easier better than the other?
Should I compile from source or install rpm version?

My kernel version is 2.4.20-6.

Redhat 9.0 of course.

Thanks.

Hi

I have both. In my experience, MPlayer is good for movie files (It plays 99% of movies I've tried perfectly, only has trouble with some .WMV's) but it is not so good at playing DVDs - no DVD menu support. Xine again, is excellent for DVDs (has DVD menu support) but is not nearly as good as MPlayer for playing movie files.

My advice is to get both - also, it is always (in my opinion) better to compile from source than use RPM / APT. This is a personal preference, but generally, if something goes wrong with an RPM you usually have NO idea where it went, what it has added or changed, etc. If you compile from source you can usually figure things out easier if there is a problem, and you have more control. For MPlayer this is vital IMHO, since I have a ./configure line that sets the compile up the way I want it. You also have more control over optimization settings, for example, which are very important in compiling media player programs like Xine and Mplayer.

i have never had luck with xine, i can't recall a time that it has ever worked, and so i use mplayer exclusively. i concede that mplayerplugin crashes mozilla more often than not, and so i removed it in order to keep my blood pressure down. i get around this by saving media files to a tmp file and then using mplayer to watch them manually.

one thing that takes mplayer from good to tinkle-your-pants awesome is to be sure and install the full codecs package available at the mplayer webpage. sometimes i'm lazy and don't add this in (like on my slackware desktop), and it's still good but not great. iirc, it makes mplayerplugin more stable, but i could be imagining things. heh.

personally, i don't install anything on red hat/fedora unless it's an rpm anymore. so if i can get my grubby fingers on a srpm and tweak the spec file with the configure settings i desire, it is ideal. if this is the case, there's not much to do besides modifying the ./configure line. if you can't get a spec file ... well, there's a 2,000 page manual on rpms out there somewhere you could read. i think summarizing it is beyond the scope of this post.