problems with mplayer, linux newb

[SPB191602]

hi, i was going to watch final fantasy advent children , but it wouldnt play with the subtitles. A few friends sed to get mplayer, it wasnt too hard to get, but everytime i try to open a video file with it this error comes up:

"error opening/intitializing the selected video_out (-vo) device"

any help would be greatly appreciated, but like i sed i am a linux newb, so any commands given would have to be easy, copy and paste-able, or black-and-white clear, tyvm in advance :P

[SPB191602]

im on zenwalk 2.2
and im using KDE, if that helps

[Krendoshazin]

Can you post all of the messages that mplayer gives you so we can see the entire output

[Loridan]

I use mplayer, and if Im not mistaken this is the same error I get when I change to a display driver that I do not have set up. There are several ways mplayer has of displaying the video, X11, X11/Overlay, SDL, etc. Try using each of them until you find one that works best. When you have a strange graphics chipset it doesnt help much either. Im using a Pundit-R motherboard which has a built in 9100 chipset and I had to tweak X quite a bit before I was happy with mplayer.

[SPB191602]

k, im going to try the above suggestion, and that is the whole error message i get