I found out through reading forums that mplayer is only a basic media player that requires codec files in order to play audio & video of Quicktime files and Real Media 9 files. I found these codecs here: http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/

and downloaded one of the all files and untarred it. Then I copied them into 2 directories:

/usr/local/lib/codecs/
and
/usr/lib/win32

This works fine in Fedora Core 3 with current Quicktime trailers. However, with live cds (such as Slax 4.2) that have mplayer on them-this procedure (on the virtual RAM drive) didn't update the codecs on the live cds. Do I need to burn it onto the live cd? If so, how?