Unable to compile MPlayer 1.5 on MacOS

[alex]

On MacOS 12.4 I tried to compile mplayer 1.5 as follows:

configure && make

but I get a compiler error

Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:
  "_x264_encoder_open_163", referenced from:
      _X264_init in libavcodec.a(libx264.o)
Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:
  "_x264_encoder_open_163", referenced from:
      _X264_init in libavcodec.a(libx264.o)
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture x86_64
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
make: *** [mencoder] Error 1
make: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture x86_64
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
make: *** [mplayer] Error 1

Is there a way to fix this error?

[alex]

The issue seem to have been with the x264 library.
And for some reasons a first reinstall of x264 did not work. But when (after some other attempts to install what is missing) I did *again*

brew reinstall x264

something was compiled. But then I did run the following three commands in exactly this order:

./configure
make clean
make

And to my total surprise it did compile finally mplayer. And it works (and fixes a bug only I seem to have).