Okay, I gave the precompiled binaries a shot, and they immediately failed with this error:
dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/X11/lib/libfontconfig.1.dylib
Referenced from: /Users/chriswei/apps/MPlayer OSX.app/Contents/Resources/External_Binaries/mplayer.app/Contents/MacOS/mplayer
Reason: image not found
2009-08-25 14:20:26.039 MPlayer OSX[17879] Abnormal playback error. mplayer returned error code: 5
I fixed that by symlinking /usr/X11R6 to /usr/X11, but then it complained about the version of libfreetype I had (wanted version 10.0.0 but I'm apparently providing version 6.3.0). I'm not about to deal with dynamically-linked library version mismatches. This kind of stuff shouldn't be necessary to watch a video file.
I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that the cost/benefit analysis for these files is getting problematic. As long as there's an app you can download that plays the file and that
just works, I don't have a problem. But it looks like there isn't such a solution for anyone running MacOS X 10.4 or earlier.
Much respect to our encoders, but could you please consider keeping to formats that are easier for our viewers to watch? For example, the Madou Monogatari TAS plays back flawlessly in my outdated VLC.