Isn't RPM wonderful? It was crap like that that forced RH8.0 off my machine and made me vow never to install another RPM-based distro again.
 
If you really want to persist with Red Hat and RPM though you could try using the force parameter (-f I think but check the RPM man page) on both packages to tell RPM to ignore the failed dependencies and install them anyway.

Using the force option is now a good idea.
 
Instead download YUM from http://shrike.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=1559 and change the /etc/yum.conf like this:

Code:

[main]cachedir=/var/cache/yumdebuglevel=2logfile=/var/log/yum.logpkgpolicy=newestdistroverpkg=redhat-releasegpgcheck=1tolerant=1exactarch=1[os]name=Red Hat Linux $releasever - $basearch - osbaseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/redhat/$releasever/$basearch/os[updates]name=Red Hat Linux $releasever - $basearch - updatesbaseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/redhat/$releasever/$basearch/updates[freshrpms]name=Red Hat Linux $releasever - $basearch - freshrpmsbaseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/redhat/$releasever/$basearch/freshrpms

 
Now you can run yum install mplayer to install mplayer

A better solution would be the people creating the RPMs getting a bit of sense and supplying stuff like this as a single package instead of trying to split it up into as many components as possible regardless of whether or not those components are useful on their own. This isn't such a bad thing in packages such as Samba or MySQL, which allow you to seperate the server from the client, but with mplayer and the Mozilla packages I had so much trouble with it's just ridiculous. YUM doesn't eliminate the problem (you'll probably find it calls RPM with -f to deal with it itself) it just sweeps it under the carpet.

or you could "rpm -Uhv" and list the packages on one line that will work
 
Oh, and --force is to replace files in overlapping packages
--nodeps is what you probably meant ( it will install regardless of anything)

You will have to install mpalyer adn mplayer-common together in one line. it will go something like this
 
rpm -Uvh mplayer------ mplayer-common-----
 
It will work out. No need for Yum or Apt in this case.