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 created and maintains the official RPM packages of MPlayer for Red Hat and Fedora Core. They are available from his 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 CVS MPlayer with libavcodec. If you need a GUI frontend, you can use xmms-embedded.