There are binary distributions, but they didn’t do the job for me. It seems to be better to install from source (particularly if your not using it as a fancy framework):
#make sure you have XCode installed... curl http://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL-1.2.14.tar.gz > SDL-1.2.14.tar.gz tar xvzf SDL-1.2.14.tar.gz ./configure --disable-assembly make sudo make install
RSS
[...] I built all this on a mac. If you want to do the same, you’ll need to install libtiff and SDL. [...]
needs a cd SDL-1.2.14 in there.