Hi. For a long while I tried unsuccessfully to have my Linux machines able to play video formats, like WMV, MPG, AVI, etc.

Finally I found a way to do it very easy in Fedora Core 6.
Here's a guideline that I hope will help other people who may need it.

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STEP 1 - set the repositories.

As explained in - http://www.fedorafaq.org/#installsoftware

just type in the following command at the Terminal


STEP 2 - install Mplayer plugin ( http://www.fedorafaq.org/#browsermovies )

Type in the following command


STEP 3 - install the complementary Mplayer GUI and supporting libraries

Select 'Add/Remove Software' and search for 'mplayer'.

Select as shown and then click 'Apply'.



STEP 4 - install the codecs for Mplayer

Follow the guideline in
http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_cor...es.html#Codecs

Only be aware to change the following items accordingly:

- site - http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/

- file - all-20061022.tar.bz2

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That should be it.

Enjoy.

That's a good tip.

Not to start a fight, but I was toying around in a new Ubuntu install yesterday and I don't believe I added any repositories for mplayer (although I did for something else, forget what now) and all I had to type was:
sudo apt-get install mplayer

Thnx Phantasm.

Oops, yes, let's be careful - this guideline worked for me on the three Fedora Core 6 machines that I have; on other distros the steps might be very different.

Actually I also have some machines with SUSE 10.0 and others with 10.2 and even there there are differences.

Rgds

Same thing, its just a console based application as opposed to the graphical one above.

I use Fedora, and I would do something like

yum install mplayer

to get that.

Not sure if its available via yum. A lot of the time, I juggle between using yum (which is RPM based packages) and downloading source code which I then compile. I certainly need to compile from source for truecrypt, which in turn can require a kernel recompile as well.

sticking to RPMs means you can avoid having to do kernel recompiles and suchlike, which although highly do-able are also prone to unforseen problems.

In Fedora you have to get it from Livna repository, it's not in Core or Extras. So, after you've added the Livna repositories to yum configuration, you can do yum install mplayer*.

It works in Ubuntu (and probably in many other distributions) without adding anything because the repositories are different and the developers might not reject applications that have patents / other "non-free" stuff.

That's an entry in /etc/yum.repo.d/ or something? What did you add?

That's how. It creates livna-devel.repo, livna.repo and livna-testing.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d.