mplayer trouble

[Novice Norman]

My humble hello to all the great linux users,
I am a novice in linux. i recently installed SuSE linux 10.1. I want to play wmv,dat,asf and other video files. here is the trouble.
I tried installing mplayer and gave up because of the gcc version 2.96. Then i tried updating my gcc to 3.4. I got the message that the CC is not set to the environment and something else. I tried using the YaST online update. That too miserably failed because it said that it did'nt find some libxine.so.1 and so on.
I hate windows and thats why i turned to linux. But now i am in the verge of irritation and desperation. I cant find a correct solution for this all over the net. So I have turned to the only site with a nice FAQ for everything in linux .
I don't want to return to windows. Please,Please help me out
Plese help me monseuirs and I will ever be grateful to all of you
Advanced Thanks to all gentlemen

[fingal]

Hi - I'm not a SuSE user, but mplayer can be quite hard to get running from scratch if you're a newbie. It's good once it's working, but you would probably do better with Xine. I don't recommend trying to compile a large programme like Xine from source for new users.

Sometimes you have to compile mplayer from source to get it running. This is certainly true on my own system, but it can take a while before you get good results. Mplayer also ships with a very scary manual: not the best way to learn about Linux and media imho.

Please be aware of one key point. Most Linux based dvd/media players will not work with all media formats without you installing the right codecs/library files separately. This is to avoid legal problems. You'll need to install:

* libdvdcss &
* libdvdread

YAST might make things easier for you, but you can find the two libraries I mentioned here. You will also need to install Windows media codecs: this isn't too hard.

Knowledge of how to create symbolic links to files and directories is useful. The command is ln . Please type man ln in a terminal and read up on that for a while. Good luck with this!