I recently found out [the hard way] that the mplayer [and xine as well] that comes with large distos like SuSE or Mandrake or what ever don't come with any codec like xvid or divx and so on. my question is this
is it best to simply install the codecs myself or to uninstall the player and then reinstall it with the needed codecs

I've always just built xine from source and it seems to play divx just fine.

You can install divx afterwards no problem
download http://www.divx.com/divx/linux/


Then cd into the dirrectory and execute install.sh as root.

How do I execute it? Linux gives me a file not found error.

As root:

cd divx4linux

or whatever the direcctory's name is

chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

I just found out in suse 9.0 there is no mplayer. Can you use the one from suse 8.2?