When I tried to do this comman (./configure --enable-gui) in Mplayer's source I got an error message: Error: X11 support required for GUI compilation. I don't understand! What kind of X11 support Mplayer needs? Please help me! Thanks in advance.

What you've posted doesn't make much sense, it would help if you could copy and paste the actual text from the shell and don't forget to include a 5 or 10 lines before the error so we can see what lead up to it.

MPlayer is difficult to setup the first time you set it up... considering you have to do it in shell ;-)

Also, you have to execute the program from shell, unless you add it to the start menu. Plus for GUI you have to have a skin in the skins folder, and a font in the fonts folder. Difficult, like I said, the first time installing, but it's -WELL- worth it I say :-)

I have this exact question. I see there was no answer here.

I downloaded mplayer and the codecs and the fonts as detailed in the README.

I ran sudo ./configure (this is in ubuntu)
Then I noticed the README says:

to configure MPlayer with the default options. The codecs you installed above
should be autodetected. GUI support has to be enabled separately, run

./configure --enable-gui

I then did that and got an error that I needed libpng and libpng-dev. Well, I had libpng, but I had to install libpng-dev. Then I ran ./configure --enable-gui again. This time I got the:
Error: X11 support required for GUI compilation.

I saw there's an --enable-x11 option, I tried that: ./configure --enable-x11 --enable-gui, but got the same error message: Error: X11 support required for GUI compilation.

I don't know what it wants. Maybe I should just forget about the gui part and stick with plain ol' ./configure.

I looked in the README for X11 and just discovered this:

- To compile MPlayer with X11 support, you need to have the XFree86 development
packages installed.
- For the GUI you need the libpng and GTK 1.2 development packages.

Maybe it doesn't like xorg?

I have, according to synaptic, gtk2-engines-abunchofstuff, including gtk2-engines-dev. There's no mention of gtk 1.2. Oh, well...

Man... does mplayer installation really suck this bad?

There are bad RPMs floating around. Specifically some of the xorg-libs-devel have a non-working Xext library. Only solution that I found was to download xorg source, compile, move my /usr/X11R6/ directory, make an empty one and install. The follow-up for this is messy though because any of your graphics libraries installed under X need to be reinstalled (gtk, glib, their devel packages etc). This can be done from your source CD, but it's still messy (rpm -i --force...). Installing by this method includes all your xorgs-libs/devel/etc, so don't go and re-install the rpm'd libraries that caused the problem in the first place ;-)

If you decide to go that route don't yell at me when you spend some time on it, but just FYI, it DID work!

There's no crying in baseball.

There's no RPM's in slackware.

And, you just helped confirm that mplayer installation really does suck!

RPMs, Binaries, either way they're out there and seem to be getting onto peoples' systems.

I think you might be missing the xorg devel libraries.

--Shade

Mplayer has extensive documentation...
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html

I use it almost exclusivally for music, video, streaming, and through my web browser and have had no problems with it.

I would suggest using your distros (UPDATED) package mgr. so it will install all the dependencies it needs. don't give up on it. It's a wonderfull program.

KC

Funny....I never had any problems like that with compiling mplayer in Slackware and I do it all the time with CVS version.

You need to make sure that you have the xorg devel package installed. It is called x11-devel (or something similar)

Slackware doesn't have devel packages...everything is included in regular Slackware package, including headers.

Yes it has for xorg, check in the package listing for Slackware 10.1.

does anybody else find it funny that after I suggested that a file found in some versions of the xorg-libs-devel binaries may be corrupt, someone with 1000+ prior posts comes in and suggests that you (or I) might not have xorg-libs-devel installed (actually 2 of them)?

I'm sorry I won't be clicking thanks!

This seems to be quite a specific problem.

BTW, having the corrupt libXext.so file also killed my OpenOffice.org, which if started from command line gave an error indicating that the Xext library was not working. Investigation using ld /usr/...../ lXorg also showed the library as being corrupt.

As most of the threads where I came across this problem also made mention of X86_64, it could be limited to the binaries available for that architecture.