> MPlayer needs quite a few headers that are not "basic". The configure > output gives little information about which of the things checked for > are really required or useful at all (some do more harm than good); You forgot to mention that your git repo is a remedy (sorry, couldn't resist). The truth is, even without "disabled optional codecs", SVN mplayer with libav* snatched as dependency will work fine (and to be clear, I just built it on my server). Bah, I was even surprised that vdpau has been built without any interaction from my side, because I'm "tracing" my nvidia drivers. The configure hints "Checking for foo..." were pretty sufficient to put the name into my favorite search engine (in case I didn't know where to look for already), get the source or check where the header required is found in a package (sometimes a guy gets lazy), compile and/or install and run mplayer's configure again to check if it works. Granted: I never been a fan of packages, dependency tracing, etc., etc. Most of my systems I've built myself (proudest moment: building gcc 4.1.2 on HP-UX 11.00 running on a B132L). The bottom line: you don't need to be a software engineer, you just need to be more self-reliant and try. It helps a lot. Rambo
