POSIX system - You need a POSIX-compatible shell and POSIX-compatible system tools like grep, sed, awk, etc. in your path.
GNU make 3.81 or later
binutils - GNU binutils 2.11 or later is known to work.
compiler - We mostly use gcc, the recommended versions on x86 are 2.95 and 3.4+. On PowerPC, use 4.x+. icc 10.1+ is also known to work.
Xorg/XFree86 - recommended version is 4.3 or later. Make sure the development packages are installed, too, otherwise it won't work. You don't absolutely need X, some video output drivers work without it.
FreeType - 2.0.9 or later is required for the OSD and subtitles
ALSA - optional, for ALSA audio output support. At least 0.9.0rc4 is required.
libjpeg - required for the optional JPEG video output driver
libpng - required for the optional PNG video output driver
directfb - optional, 0.9.22 or later required for the directfb/dfbmga video output drivers
lame - 3.98.3 or later, necessary for encoding MP3 audio with MEncoder
zlib - recommended, many codecs use it.
LIVE555 Streaming Media - optional, needed for some RTSP/RTP streams
cdparanoia - optional, for CDDA support
libxmms - optional, for XMMS input plugin support. At least 1.2.7 is required.
libsmb - optional, for SMB networking support
libmad - optional, for fast integer-only MP3 decoding on FPU-less platforms