Well I'm getting frustrated now with suse 8.2 and the mplayer/xine it comes packaged with since they're pretty useless being stripped down and not being able to play back much due to patents and copyrights.

I tried updating it with all the codecs and newer rpm packages but ran into some strange problems. I'm not saavy enough in linux to troubleshoot it any further.

When I try to upgrade to the newest version now I get this

This is what yast2 reports for mplayer.

As near as I can tell this is the version of mplayer I have installed.

Might I be so bold as to suggest...

A compile? Grab the real version from www.mplayerhq.hu and compile that puppy, giving you full control over what goes into it and what doesn't.

Cool

how do I go about uninstalling the previous version? rpm -e doesn't seem to work and I can't uncheck it in Yast2

I don't see a way to uninstall software not included on the suse 8.2 disks unless I use yast2 - install and remove software which is suse8.2 specific for their rpms. The screenshot in my original post shows the new version of mplayer I installed as being locked. The unchecked version in that screenshot is the default installation of mplayer I uninstalled. The reason I uninstalled it is because it doesn't allow you to play dvd's or movies or much of anything. When I try deleting the locked version of mplayer this is what I get.

I'm assuming I can just install from source and ignore any of the rpm issues I'm having based on the response I was given in this thread so that's the route I've taken.

However when I try to install from source I have problems getting certain things working that I assume I will need to get full use of mplayer using this to configure it:

# ./configure --enable gui --enable-runtime-cpudetection --enable-mpdvdkit

This is what configure.log reports on things I think I'll need that might not be configured properly because they don't have the Result set to 'yes':

The only thing I've been able to get functioning is XVID codec and Win32 codec DLL support including realplayer.

I forgot to mention that everything I did attempt to install were these:
-MPlayer-1.0pre1.tar.bz2.tar
-divx4linux-std-20030428.tar.gz.tar
-extralite.tar.bz2.gz
-w32codecs.tar.bz2.tar
-xvidcore-0.9.2.tar.gz
-libdvdcss-0.03.ogle3.tar.gz.tar
-libdvdnav-0.1.3.tar.gz
-libdvdread-0.9.3.tar.gz.tar

I not certain if they're working properly though, but based on the configure.log in mplayer I think that xvid and the win32 codecs are working.

-libdvdcss-0.03.ogle3.tar.gz.tar
-libdvdnav-0.1.3.tar.gz
-libdvdread-0.9.3.tar.gz.tar

Are not necessary with Mplayer as the mpdvdkit over rules them.

Next, you want to compile with Lame if you plan on using mencoder at all, so grab and install that as well (it's for MP3 compression).

Other than that, all the above from your configure log looks good. As for the problem with uninstalling, I really don't know what to tell you (I'm not an RPM guru as I don't use em), maybe try a --no-deps or something with rpm -e.

Cool

Installing from source worked flawlessly. I just wish rpms were as easy to work with as compiling from source...