The main development platform is Linux on x86, although MPlayer works on many other Linux ports. Binary packages of MPlayer are available from several sources. However, none of these packages are supported. Report problems to the authors, not to us.
To build a Debian package, run the following command in the MPlayer source directory:
fakeroot debian/rules binary
If you want to pass custom options to configure, you can set up the
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS environment variable. For instance,
if you want GUI and OSD menu support you would use:
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="--enable-gui --enable-menu" fakeroot debian/rules binary
You can also pass some variables to the Makefile. For example, if you want to compile with gcc 3.4 even if it's not the default compiler:
CC=gcc-3.4 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="--enable-gui" fakeroot debian/rules binary
To clean up the source tree run the following command:
fakeroot debian/rules clean
As root you can then install the .deb package as usual:
dpkg -i ../mplayer_version.deb
Christian Marillat has been making unofficial Debian packages of MPlayer, MEncoder and our binary codec packages for a while, you can (apt-)get them from his homepage.
Dominik Mierzejewski maintains the official RPM packages of MPlayer for Fedora Core. They are available from Livna repository.
Mandrake/Mandriva RPM packages are available from the P.L.F.. SuSE used to include a crippled version of MPlayer in their distribution. They have removed it in their latest releases. You can get working RPMs from links2linux.de.
MPlayer works on Linux PDAs with ARM CPU e.g. Sharp Zaurus, Compaq Ipaq. The easiest way to obtain MPlayer is to get it from one of the OpenZaurus package feeds. If you want to compile it yourself, you should look at the mplayer and the libavcodec directory in the OpenZaurus distribution buildroot. These always have the latest Makefile and patches used for building a SVN MPlayer. If you need a GUI frontend, you can use xmms-embedded.