MPlayer should work on Solaris 2.6 or newer. Use the SUN audio driver with the -ao sun option for sound.
On UltraSPARCs, MPlayer takes advantage of their VIS extensions (equivalent to MMX), currently only in libmpeg2, libvo and libavcodec, but not in mp3lib. You can watch a VOB file on a 400MHz CPU. You'll need mLib installed.
To build the package you will need GNU make (gmake, /opt/sfw/gmake), native Solaris make will not work. Typical error you get when building with Solaris' make instead of GNU make:
% /usr/ccs/bin/make make: Fatal error in reader: Makefile, line 25: Unexpected end of line seen
On Solaris SPARC, you need the GNU C/C++ Compiler; it does not matter if GNU C/C++ compiler is configured with or without the GNU assembler.
On Solaris x86, you need the GNU assembler and the GNU C/C++ compiler, configured to use the GNU assembler! The MPlayer code on the x86 platform makes heavy use of MMX, SSE and 3DNOW! instructions that cannot be compiled using Sun's assembler /usr/ccs/bin/as.
The configure script tries to find out, which assembler program is used by your "gcc" command (in case the autodetection fails, use the --as=/wherever/you/have/installed/gnu-as option to tell the configure script where it can find GNU "as" on your system).
Error message from configure on a Solaris x86 system using GCC without GNU assembler:
% configure ... Checking assembler (/usr/ccs/bin/as) ... , failed Please upgrade(downgrade) binutils to 2.10.1...(Solution: Install and use a gcc configured with --with-as=gas)
Typical error you get when building with a GNU C compiler that does not use GNU as:
% gmake
...
gcc -c -Iloader -Ilibvo -O4 -march=i686 -mcpu=i686 -pipe -ffast-math
-fomit-frame-pointer -I/usr/local/include -o mplayer.o mplayer.c
Assembler: mplayer.c
"(stdin)", line 3567 : Illegal mnemonic
"(stdin)", line 3567 : Syntax error
... more "Illegal mnemonic" and "Syntax error" errors ...
Due to bugs in Solaris 8, you may not be able to play DVD discs larger than 4 GB:
The sd(7D) driver on Solaris 8 x86 has a bug when accessing a disk block >4GB on a device using a logical blocksize != DEV_BSIZE (i.e. CD-ROM and DVD media). Due to a 32Bit int overflow, a disk address modulo 4GB is accessed (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/solarisonintel/message/22516). This problem does not exist in the SPARC version of Solaris 8.
A similar bug is present in the hsfs(7FS) filesystem code (AKA ISO9660), hsfs may not not support partitions/disks larger than 4GB, all data is accessed modulo 4GB (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/solarisonintel/message/22592). The hsfs problem can be fixed by installing patch 109764-04 (sparc) / 109765-04 (x86).