Last night I decided to give a shot at completely removing windows from my machine, since the most it was really doing was taking up 4 gigs of my hdd. Well... the most I was really using it for was kazaa and watching a couple music videos that are in .wmv format. I heard that mplayer can play .wmv files, so I installed it. Now I can get sound from the video, but, no video from it. What do I need to do to get video from a wmv?

You need the windows codecs. You can download them from mplayers site. In fact, I would download and install all the codecs that they offer just so you have that functionality.

i just got mplayer up and running on my mandrake 9.1 today, you need the win32 codecs.

you need to create a win32 folder in your /usr/lib directory ( /usr/lib/win32 ) extract your win32 codecs in here, then you need to recompile your mplayer package ( RPM ) or tarball again to enable support for the win32 codecs, if you don't then you wont be able to play the those formats.

There is also a qt-codecs as well ( Quicktime files ) download thes 1's as well and put them in the same directory and compile them at the same time.