The main development platform is Linux on x86, although MPlayer works on many other Linux ports. Binary packages of MPlayer are available from several sources. However, none of these packages are supported. Report problems to the authors, not to us.
To build a Debian package, run the following command in the MPlayer source directory:
fakeroot debian/rules binaryAs root you can then install the .deb package as usual:
dpkg -i ../mplayer_version.deb
Christian Marillat has been making unofficial Debian MPlayer, MEncoder and font packages for a while, you can (apt-)get them from his homepage.
Dominik Mierzejewski created and maintains official Red Hat RPM packages of MPlayer. They are available from his homepage.
Mandrake RPM packages are available from the P.L.F.. SuSE used to include a crippled version of MPlayer in their distribution. They have removed it in their latest releases. You can get working RPMs from links2linux.de.
MPlayer works on Linux PDAs with ARM CPU e.g. Sharp Zaurus, Compaq Ipaq. The easiest way to obtain MPlayer is to get it from one of the OpenZaurus package feeds. If you want to compile it yourself, you should look at the mplayer and the libavcodec directory in the OpenZaurus distribution buildroot. These always have the latest Makefile and patches used for building a CVS MPlayer with libavcodec. If you need a GUI frontend, you can use xmms-embedded.