On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, Christian Costa wrote: [...]
At least here (Debian) mplayer depends on the libavcodec package instead of copying the source (but it's a bit of a special case as they come from a third-party package repository).
This is surprising because libavcodec and libavformat are static libraries so once the binary is generated there is no more dependency.
IIRC this third-party repository contains both the libavcodec package and the mplayer package so I suspect the two are very closely tied together.