complete newby needs help

[munsterboy]

Am completely new to linux. I have an old pc in a Summer house I use at week-ends and I also have an external drive(ext3) that I want to use to transfer mainly tv programs from a Freesat box, hence Linux. I have no internet connection in the house.
I got a Slax Live disk and booted the pc and it played the programs from the external drive. It crashes now and then and not all the controls work, ( e.g. I can't fast forward the ads), but overall it does it's job.
I was looking for some thing better however, and I installed Knoppix to the Hard Drive of the pc. Everything is fine except video. The Mplayer will not play files from my external drive and will not play DVDs.
To sum up, KPlayer from Slax will work, but Mplayer from Knoppix will not. Hopefully someone might suggest something as I am quite pleased with the rest of Knoppix on what will only be a Media playing machine. I hope to stay away from typing into the terminal as much as possible as it brings back Dos days nightmares.
Thanks from Ireland
Munsterboy.

[krishna.murphy]

Lots of options here. My inclination ordinarily would be to use synaptic or apt-get to install from the online archives, e.g. (based on the kplayer sourceforge site)

sudo echo 'deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org unstable main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mplayer kplayer kplayer-doc libdvdcss w32codecs

Those are both available within Knoppix (as well as Gdebi if you find a .deb file) but you would have to take the machine to a site with Internet connectivity. Unless, of course, you install to a flash drive at home, do the install of kplayer and then take it back out to your other site. Note that mplayer is included, and it's likely IMHO that the problem you have with it now would persist with kplayer under Knoppix because it's coming from another difference between your Slax setup and Knoppix. It might be more productive to try to determine what the video driver is in the Slax setup and see if you can get that into Knoppix.

Another option is to dual-boot, using Slax when you want to watch a movie. None of these are especially tricky, though they will probably require "patience and persistence" to succeed.

Hope that's helpful!
Krishna

[munsterboy]

Will have to think about this as most of it is over my head.
Thanks,
Munsterboy.