MPlayer's configure script checks for a character device at /dev/lirc first to determine whether or not to include LIRC support. On my system (gentoo), devfs is used, so the character device it's looking for is actually called /dev/lirc/0 (however, I think this may be different for other lirc drivers), so the test fails. Of course I can still enable LIRC support, and it works fine, still I think there is some room for improvement. The best solution, I think, would be to check for what MPlayer really needs to compile lirc support: the lirc_client header file. And that's what the configure script actually does, but only when it finds the character device at /dev/lirc first. So: simply remove the check for /dev/lirc and everything should be fine. Anyway: thanks for bringing us the best video player on earth, keep up the good work.