我的debian etch系统，apt的mplayer，使用一直都很不正常，每次打开都会弹出"Cannot prepare subtitle font"的错误提示，播放任何文件就不停地弹出对话框，很是无奈。
去G了一下，看到一篇文章里好像提到有这个现象。

[quote] it's not the problem of locale setting at all.
in mdv 2007', the default setting on 'fontconfig' of mplayer.conf in /etc/mplayer/ is yes. however the documentation tells us :
'If MPlayer was compiled with fontconfig support, the above methods won't work, instead -font expects a fontconfig font name and defaults to the sans-serif font. ...'
(http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/fonts-osd.html)
so it's quite possiblely just the problem of this default setting.

in my own experience,at first i also got lots of following warning:
Selected font is not scalable. Using ppem=15.
FT_Set_Pixel_Sizes failed.
Wrong bounding box, width <= 0 !
Cannot prepare subtitle font.
even if i had specified the font in the .conf file or in command line.
when i disable the setting of 'fontconfig=yes' in the .conf ,there is no more 'using ppem=15' warning at all.[/quote]

似乎这个问题和fontconfig有关系，vim /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf，将fontconfig = yes  --->no，现在使用一切正常。