not impossible, just improbabale. Hint, use urpmi mplayer and get the pre-compiled mandrake version, movies play, with sound, but seems like the frames won't advance, but mayhaps because i have a really slow computer, p2 333 thinkpad laptop with only 96M ram

URPMI is great, except that it's outdated most of the time. When I try updating my software, it always grab some old outdated version. Probably the exception is Mplayer, but everything else that I have gotten with urpmi is an old version.

unless you specificly want Xine, why not try mplayer http://www.mplayerhq.hu it plays just about any media

Xine can share codes with mplayer. If u have install mplayer and all codes, u can download here:
http://www4.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/codecs.html

extract and copy them to /usr/lib/win32

as far as mplayer playing every kind of media there is, i haven't found that to be true. it farts on quicktime movies complaining about not finding an audio codec, while xine plays them fine. and this is using the codecs package from mplayer.

http://www.google.com/search?q=canno...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

tried solutions with editing mplayer's configuration file manually but it's a no go. so i stick with xine for everything.

anyway, the version of xine quoted (0.9.23) is the xine-ui version. the latest version of xine (xine-libs) is 1-1_rc5-0. for me using the latest xine-lib version and the 0.99.1 version of xine-ui works flawlessly for me. the latest xine-ui version (0.99.2) caused my system to just hang and i don't recommend using that version of xine-ui at all.

i don't know why you're getting real crappy playback with xine. if it is a mandrake issue, you'd probably want to let them know what's happening. if you have all the development packages and dependancies, there's no reason i can think of why xine wouldn't compile on mandrake, but that's just my thinking.

mplayer can player all media file type? I don't think so. i.e, it can't play flash's .swf file but realplay10 can.

i think it more crappy computer can't handle the playback, imho anyway. I need more power, but my budjet says be glad it's not a 486/dx2/50