I have already added some replies to a former post but throught that it might be better for me to start a new thread on this in the 'installation' section of the forum.

Im using R5D1 on my system and am having problems watching videos through mythtv. MPlayer (after an installing the new package) will work without problems if i open a video file with MPlayer in the KDE. Now whenever i try to watch a video in mythtv it simply says 'Loading' briefly and then does nothing.

Can anyone give me a clue as to what might be going on here as mplayer is obviously working, just not through the mythtv frontend. Oh and mplayer is residing in the folder /root/MPlayer-1.0rc1/.

Did you install KDE on your knoppmythbox? If you are not using knoppmyth then you may want to try the regular mythtv mailing list.
Providing you are using knoppmyth and knoppmyth's desktop...
When you say you installed a new package what exactly do you mean? /root/MPlayer... is not a normal place for a typical debian package to install mplayer to. It does not install it there when you compile and install it from source either. I'd say that is your first problem.
Next as root do updatedb and then as mythtv user from /home/mythtv type which mplayer and see what directory it is finding mplayer. I doubt it isn't using the one on /root/Mplayer.. as unless you changed your path settings that directory isn't in your path anyway. From a terminal you can also do mplayer --version to see what version that is.
With all of that information you should just need to go into the media settings and change the player by going into video settings, player settings, put in the entire path to mplayer and try it again. But from your description it sounds like you are not using knoppmyth, or you have made a heavily modified version that is quite different from a normal knoppmyth setup.

_________________
ASUS A7N266 Micro-ATX Motherboard
Athlon 2200 processor
512K Kingston PC2100 Memory
MicroAtx Case
2 PVR250's w/remote
eVGA e-GeForce mx4000 (64 Ram with Tv/Out (Svideo))
Lite-on DVD cd-rw combo
120 GB Western Digital

Sorry my bad, KDE was totally the wrong word to use, i meant the normal desktop environment that you go to when you exit from knoppmyth. Anyway that is by the by as i have reinstalled knoppmyth R5D1 from scratch and found that i have exactly the same problem with the mplayer which comes with the knoppmyth package. I have an episode of 24 on my system which i can easily watch in the desktop environment but nowt happens in mythtv, it just says 'loading' briefly and then nothing happens. Since i havent touched it MPlayer is in the usual place (usr/bin). The only change i have made to the system is the download of Konqueror.

Please help as i really want to watch my videos in mythtv

did you follow my steps? Most importantly is to do which mplayer and then make sure that is in video player settings. in the video player settings make sure to put the whole path in. like /usr/bin/mplayer try to do it without the other additions at the end at first. Does it work on other videos?

_________________
ASUS A7N266 Micro-ATX Motherboard
Athlon 2200 processor
512K Kingston PC2100 Memory
MicroAtx Case
2 PVR250's w/remote
eVGA e-GeForce mx4000 (64 Ram with Tv/Out (Svideo))
Lite-on DVD cd-rw combo
120 GB Western Digital

Ok so it kind of works - in a pathetically useless kind of way. I did a whole new system installation and as you suggested got rid of all the arguments after the 'mplayer' command in mythtv. So that actually boots up mplayer which is great. However the video wont play, if i repeatedly tap the play button on my remote it will jump through individual frames of the movie but just repeat that frame over and over again - im pretty sure thats what it is doing as the soundtrack to the video just starts repeating for that particular frame.

What the hell is going on here. This whole saga with me trying to get various parts of the system to even work in the slightest is really starting to turn me off the whole project

After reinstalling the system a few minutes ago it turns out the problem was my updating of mplayer as per the instructions from another post on this forum

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... ayer+codec

I believe that the problem lies in my reinstallation of mplayer. Can i install the codecs without having to reinstall mplayer?

I believe all codecs are compiled into mplayer by default they are just not provided. You can put them in /usr/lib/win32 directory.

_________________
ASUS A7N266 Micro-ATX Motherboard
Athlon 2200 processor
512K Kingston PC2100 Memory
MicroAtx Case
2 PVR250's w/remote
eVGA e-GeForce mx4000 (64 Ram with Tv/Out (Svideo))
Lite-on DVD cd-rw combo
120 GB Western Digital