[conspire] mplayer account permissions

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ken Bernard (kenbernard at gmail.com):

> I would like to change the account permission for mplayer on my Centos 5.3
> desktop computer. Currently if I want to use mplayer to view video files, I
> have to use xterm and type 'sudo    mplayer     /file/path/video'   where
> /file/path/video is the full directory path to the video file I want to
> watch.

My apologies if the answer to this question is non-obvious, but _why_ is
it necessary to wield root authority, just to play such files?

Is the ownership/rights mask on /file/path/video the issue?  What
rights/ownership do those files have?

It might be that you want to chown/chgrp those files, or you just might
need to become a member of the group that owns them. 

I'm a little fuzzy on mplayer, but you might need to check what
information it's logging, to see what specifically it lacks permission
to read or write, when you attempt to use it as a non-root user.

> I want to change the default mplayer permissions so that mplayer opens with
> root permission, when I access it (the mplayer application) from my GUI
> Applications menu. 

No, you really should not want that.  That would really, really be
undesirable.  You don't want something as big and risky and buggy as
mplayer running with root authority, especially given that it's 
handling files fetched off the Internet, and no such application should 
need elevated privilege just to read and display video files.