On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 09:28 -0700, Kevin DeKorte wrote: > I was trying to build mplayer from the git repository and noticed that > my builds were failing since the make command tries to install things as > part of the process. > > I do not like to build things as root, so I think the git build scripts > need to be fixed so that it can properly build in a non-root environment. The mplayer-build repo certainly does NOT need to be built as root. The internally used static FFmpeg and libass libraries are created under the build tree so that needs no extra permissions. Did you perhaps specify --prefix, and incorrectly place that in common_options? The static libraries created during the build process are not suitable for system-wide installation, so specifying --prefix for them makes no sense; if you want to install the resulting mplayer binary in a particular location then place --prefix in mplayer_options. There should probably be a separate warning against --prefix in common_options as many users seem to make the same mistake... Note that it's worth distinguishing between the mplayer repo and the mplayer-build repo - the former can in principle be built stand-alone if you have separately compiled libraries. I assume you meant the build repo.