Codecs

[Tim]

On Sat, 2008-08-23 at 13:35 +0200, Leon Vergottini wrote:
> I am looking for codecs so that I can play my AVI, and other audio
> formats.

What are you trying to play the files with?

Totem, listed as "Movie Player" in the Gnome menus, will use the
gstreamer plugins.  If you set up the Livna repo [1] you can add the
good, bad, and, ugly plugins for it.  That'll increase that player's
abilities.

i.e. yum install gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly

Mplayer seems to handle more formats, and you can add a binary codec
bundle downloaded from their website [2].  It's a tarball, pick the one
for Linux, and you'd manually unpack it to one of the default locations.
It's probably easier to yum install mplayer from the usual Fedora repos,
and just use the codec tarball, rather than install everything from the
tarballs on the mplayer site.  The mplayer-gui package seems a bit
dicey, I've often found the GUIfied version to crash playing files that
the other command line version would play fine.  Using something else
for the GUI, such as gnome-mplayer, seemed much more reliable.

Xine plays a lot of files, too.  And if you install the
xine-lib-extras-nonfree package from the Livna repo, it plays even more.

And there's VLC.  That plays a plethora of files, and includes a lot of
codecs in its installation.  Again, you can install that from the Livna
repo.

Mplayer's probably my preferred player, VLC my second choice.  I haven't
really tried any others.

1.  Visit http://rpm.livna.org/ and follow their instructions
2.  Visit http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

A listing of the packages on my system that would seem to be obviously
related to the various players is below.  There may be some other things
that are used too, but yum should fetch them for you if the package is
needed.

gstreamer
gstreamer-plugins-bad
gstreamer-plugins-base
gstreamer-plugins-good
gstreamer-plugins-pulse
gstreamer-plugins-flumpegdemux
gstreamer-plugins-ugly
gstreamer-python
gstreamer-tools
totem-gstreamer

mplayer
mplayer-gui

xine
xine-lib
xine-lib-extras-nonfree
xine-lib-pulseaudio

vlc
vlc-core

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.