&kplayer; uses &mplayer; as the multimedia backend for playing audio and video files and streams. This ensures maximum variety of supported types of files and encodings. You need to have &mplayer; version 1.0-pre8 or later. If there are good binary packages for your distribution, use those. For example on Debian you would do echo 'deb http://debian-multimedia.org unstable main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list apt-get update apt-get install mplayer Substitute unstable for stable or testing as required. The same repository also has a &kplayer; package, so you can install it as well: apt-get install kplayer As always compiling from source is an option. X11 is required. The X Server and libraries released by X.org are recommended. XFree86 may also work. XVideo extension is recommended. You can check your /etc/X11/xorg.conf or /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file for a line that reads Load "extmod" This is the line that loads XVideo extension, so make sure it is not disabled. Also check /var/log/Xorg.0.log or /var/log/XFree86.0.log to make sure that XVideo is loaded without error. See the Configuration micro-HOWTO if you want to use a different video output. &kplayer; 0.6 supports &kde; 3.1 and later, so you need to either run a relatively recent &kde; (recommended) or at least have &kde; libraries and the corresponding Qt libraries on your system. The recommended way to install &kplayer; is by using the binary package built specifically for your distribution. The Downloads section of the &kplayer; home page lists the available packages and repositories. If you cannot install a precompiled binary for any reason, you can compile &kplayer; yourself. See the Compilation Micro-HOWTO for instructions. If you want to try the latest and greatest &kplayer; features at the risk of getting some parts of it broken, you can compile the latest CVS code. See the Compilation Micro-HOWTO for details.