How to install codecs to play all video,audio formats in fedora

Fedora comes with a ton of software but there are still plenty of packages of interest to most users that are not included for a variety of reasons. This is where you find the MP3 plug-in and a ton of other packages.

These instructions can vary depending on 32bit or 64bit architecture. If there is a difference it will be noted. If you don't know which architecture you're running you can run the following command:

$ uname -m

It will shows like this:

x86_64
...or...
i686

Before you add repositories it's probably a good idea to make sure your system is fully updated first. At this point I'm prefering the Livna repository as it's the most useful and complete but at some point I might need to add another one for things that are lacking there. The easiest way to get started is to install the livna-release packages:

# rpm -ihv http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm

Upgrading from previous Fedora

There are a few things you need to do when upgrading from a previous version of Fedora. This was tested only with Fedora 7 so older versions may not work quite as easily. The first thing you want to do is upgrade the repository package for the newer version.

# rpm -Uhv http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm

And finally you're going to need to do an update of the whole system. This will most likely pick up official Fedora updates as well as updated packages from the Livna repository. This might take a while.

# yum -y update

The above will install updates to you

Install MP3 Plug-in

Since you've been following along this next step is about as easy as it gets. Just use yum to automatically install the MP3 plug-ins for xmms and Rhythmbox like this:

# yum -y install xmms xmms-mp3 xmms-faad2 gstreamer-plugins-ugly \
gstreamer-plugins-bad libmad libid3tag

While you're here you might as well install music player Banshee:

# yum -y install banshee

The -y flag is to automatically answer yes to any question. If you want to be able to say no you can ignore that flag.

While you're there I highly recommend the grip CD ripper which supports both MP3 and Ogg formats. Once again installation is quite simple:

# yum -y install grip

This will install grip.

Install Macromedia Flash/Shockwave plug-in

Flash Plug-in 9.0
32-bit instructions:

It's now "Windows easy". Just go to a site that uses flash such as YouTube and try to view a video. At the top of the window you will get a prompt like this:

Just click on Install Missing Plugins and follow the prompts. It will install the plug-in for the currently installed user only, not system wide.

64-bit instructions:

# rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
# rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux
# mkdir -p /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
# yum install nspluginwrapper.{i386,x86_64} pulseaudio-lib.i386
# yum install flash-plugin
# mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v

this will install flash plugins to mozilla and others.

Install DVD player

Currently I find the DVD player that works best is the Xine Multimedia Player which is found in the Livna repository so installing it is just this simple:

# yum -y install xine xine-lib xine-skins xine-lib-extras-nonfree libdvdcss

This will install the xine DVD/VCD/CD player. Now to get xine to automatically play a DVD upon insertion instead of the Totem player which can't actually play DVDs, you can simply use the gconftool-2 utility as follows:

$ gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/volume_manager/autoplay_dvd_command \
'xine --auto-play --auto-scan dvd' --type='string'


Install MPlayer Media Player

At some point you're probably going to want to play a QuickTime, AVI or ASF file so you'll want the MPlayer media player. Fortunately with the FreshRpms repositories it's also very easy to download and install. Then you can go ahead and install mplayer and all it's dependencies:

# yum -y install mplayer mplayer-gui mplayer-skins mplayer-fonts mplayerplug-in

This command line will download the whole kit and kaboodle, command line utilities, plug-ins, etc. If you want to play content from a command line you will want to use the gmplayer version which will include a skin-able control panel. Restart your web browser after that whole mess is done installing and you'll also have a plug-in for Mozilla so you can play embedded content. While you're at it be sure to configure mplayer to use the Pulse sound system rather than the default. It just works better. Edit the file ~/.mplayer/config and add the following line:

ao=pulse

You can enable support for mms streaming by opening Firefox and click on the special URL about:config. Right click on the list and choose New then choose String. For the preference name enter network.protocol-handler.app.mms then for the string value enter gmplayer.

Special 64-bit instructions:

The above installs the 64-bit version of everything but because your other plug-ins are 32-bits you need to run the 32-bit version of Firefox, which won't be able to use the 64-bit version of the plug-in you just installed. The plug-in can use the 64-bit version of the mplayer application just fine so all you need to do then is to install the 32-bit mplayerplug-in plus a dependency it requires. If you know of any easier way to do this please let me know below.

# rpm -ihv http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/7/mplayerplug-in/mplayerplug-in-3.40-1.fc7.i386.rpm

And finally you'll probably also want some additional codecs to play all that proprietary video that seems to have infected the Internet.

Go to the MPlayer Download page and find the Binaries Codec Package section then follow the link for codecs directory. There you will grab the latest all codecs file. You'll need to install those files in /usr/local/lib/codecs. Here are the steps. Remember the exact file names may change at some point. If you also installed xine you will need a symlink since it expects codecs to be in a different directory.

# gtar xjvf all-20071007.tar.bz2
# mv all-20071007/* /usr/local/lib/codecs
# ln -s /usr/local/lib/codecs /usr/lib/codecs
# ln -s /usr/local/lib/codecs /usr/local/lib/win32


Install VLC (VideoLAN Client)

Multimedia can be the achilles heel of Linux, but with just a little work you should be able to play just about anything your friends can. Besides Mplayer the other great video player is called VLC. It too is trivially easy to install once you have your repositories set up:

# yum -y install vlc

Once the client and a zillion dependencies get installed you can play a huge variety of video formats easy with the command vlc

Install RealPlayer 10 Media Player

Just install it:

$ rpm -ihv RealPlayer-10.1.0.3114-20070503.i586.rpm

If you also installed Mplayer above then you will likely run into a problem where the Mplayer provided Real Media plug-in will be run instead of the one installed by the RealPlayer package. The mplayer verison of the plug-in does not work correctly in most cases and causes more problems than it solves. The only way I've found to get rid of it is to just simply delete the plug-in files:

# cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
# rm mplayerplug-in-rm.*

Install Java J2RE and Mozilla Plug-in

Fedora 8 now includes a fully open source Java implementation complete with Firefox plugin. You can verify it's there at the command line:

$ java -version

It will shows like this
java version "1.7.0"
IcedTea Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-b21)
IcedTea Client VM (build 1.7.0-b21, mixed mode)