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.