I just installed mplayer on my Redhat 9 machine. I followed these directions and the installation worked just fine. Now when I try to run mplayer by typing mplayer at the command line, it tells me command not found. When I run rpm -q mplayer* from /tmp it turns up nothing. When I run the same command from /, it finds mplayer common, gui, skins. And finally, man mplayer turns up the manual. Any ideas? Thanks.

according to that site, the rpm should have installed mplayer into /usr/bin, so cd into /usr/bin, type dir, and see if mplayer is listed; if not, the rpm didn't install

make sure you install the rpm like so (i hope i get the command right...)
rpm -Uvh package.rpm

you should get 2 100%'s

mplayer depends on so many libs, that it is often better to compile from source; just download the source from mplayer's homepage (and the win32 codecs)
untar the codecs, and place the files in /usr/lib/win32

untar mplayer's source (use the version 1.0p4)
./configure --enable-gui
make
su
make install
exit

then you can install a theme; run mplayer and gmplayer once to make sure they are installed (but they won't do anything or error out since you didn't tell them to play anything)
place a skin in /usr/local/share/mplayer/Skin/, and then create a symlink called 'default' to the skin-name

Try gmplayer in console. That's what I was told and it worked for me, but I still have problems starting files/dvds...

What you haven't noticed (and it's explained on the website) is that the GUI version only contains gmplayer and not mplayer. If you want mplayer (==the command line version), you need to install the mplayer-1.x-x.rpm.

try "which mplayer" - that should find the binary you installed - of course you can go search by hand.

Problem could be, that it got installed in a directory, which is not in your PATH such as /usr/local/bin
If you found it (somewhere) - check that.

In that case you will have to call it with its full pathname like this /PATH/TO/MPLAYER/mplayer or add this directory to your $PATH environment-variable
You can do this by hand in a terminal ( export PATH=$PATH:/PATH/TO/MPLAYER) or do it permanently by adding it to your shell's startup scripts ( $HOME/.bashrc or ./$HOME/.bash_profile)

try it

Jochen