If you using MPlayer for the first time, you notice an error message where it says it cannot find subfont.ttf, to solve this problem you can either copy a truetype font to the ./mplayer directory and rename it to subfont.ttf, edit the mplayer configuration file with “font=” with the path to a particular font, or just create a symbolic link.
To create a symbolic link, first you need to know where the font you want to use is located, lets say we want to use a Times font so we do a locate command to find the font path…
~>locate Times.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/TSCu_Times.ttf
Notice it responded with the location of a font, in my case… /usr/share/fonts/truetype/TSCu_Times.ttf now to create a symbolic link (symlink), we go into the mplayer configuration directory.
~>cd .mplayer
~./mplayer>
Now we can create the symlink using the ln command. The syntax to use is “ln -s source target” where source is the location of the file and target is the symlink you want to create.
~./mplayer>lm -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/TSCu_Times.ttf subfont.ttf
done… your Mplayer would now run without asking for any subfont.ttf and it would use the font you specified for its use.