This is a strange one on me, hopefully it makes sense to someone. Back when I used XFree86's direct log in, I had no trouble running mplayer from a regular user xterm. Now that I log in and issue "startx" I get this error for both the local codecs.conf and the one in /usr/local/share/mplayer: Reading /home/player/.mplayer/codecs.conf: parse error at line 6 Reading /usr/local/share/mplayer/codecs.conf: parse error at line 6 (copy/ln etc/codecs.conf (from MPlayer source tree) to ~/.mplayer/codecs.conf) Terminated If I run mplayer as root, it works fine. Evidently the parse error doesn't occur. I did update the codecs.conf file, btw. TIA for any clue. Kyle