This is my last hurdle and if I can get over it, I will be doing everything in Linux(Mandrake 9.1) that I always did in windows.

I am able to watch DVD's and some wmp movies with mplayer, but that's it. I would also like to watch streaming video from some of my favorite sites (quicktime movie trailers, tech tv, heavytv, etc), but I guess I just don't understand how to go about it.

I have downloaded the all-in-one package from mplayer's site, but I'm really not sure what to do with it once it is extracted. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I have yet to find information that helps me with this.

So......Is anyone willing to help a newbie be completely weaned from windows?

Mplayer should do it. What distribution are you using? If it's redhat or mandrake you should have no problems just getting the latest packages.
If it's debian, you need to set your sources.list to point to a repository with mplayer packages, then use the "apt-get" tool to get the latest versions.

I'd reccommend giving "xine" the video player a try too. It supports quicktime and asf as well as DVD and Xvid/Divx.. You should be able to get at least one of those two video players working for you.

I guess this has been my problem all along. I am running Mandrake 9.1 and everyone keeps telling me it should just work the way it is. Problem is, it doesn't.

I have tried xine, but I get the same result with it: I can play DVD's but cannot play anything else even though I have installed all the codecs that are available for it.

I must missing something really simple or making some sort of mistake. In the meantime I guess I will continue scouring for an answer.

Would you be able to copy/paste the output from mplayer when you try and play amovie file that fails? To do this (in case you don't know) you will need to bring up a terminal window and type "mplayer myfile.wmv" or some such (where myfile.wmv is replaced with the relevant file name).

mplayer is quite explicit (if a little jargony) about what it doesn't like.

Andy M

PS I would recommend having both mplayer *and xine working. Each does things the other can't.