Howto Play Music And Video In Fedora 10

How to play music and video(MP3, MPEG, AVI, FLV and other multimedia files) in Fedora 10?

Due to patent encumbrance codecs required to play some proprietary file formats are not shipped with Fedora. Codecs are the programs that encode and decode digital data. These codecs are available in the livna repository for Fedora 8. You will be able to play mpeg, mp3, avi, flv and other commonly used file formats for music and video. You will require an Internet connection to download and install these packages on your computer.

Let us get started. Are you ready?

playing music and video in Fedora 10

1. Open a terminal and switch to root user.
Launch the terminal from the panel menu
Click Applications->System Tools->Terminal
On the terminal type:

su -

Type your root password and hit enter key on the keyboard.

2. Check whether sound is properly configured on your system.

play /usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav

If you hear sounds proceed further. Otherwise check volume control and sound devices configuration. Below is the output when you play the wav sound file from the terminal.

Input File     : '/usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav'
Sample Size    : 16-bit (2 bytes)
Sample Encoding: signed (2's complement)
Channels       : 2
Sample Rate    : 44100

Time: 00:02.50 [00:00.00] of 00:02.50 ( 100.0%) Output Buffer: 110.36K

Done.

3. Enable the rpm.livna.org, RPM Fusion free and non free repositories.

rpm -Uvh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-10.rpm

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

4. Remove the totem and xine packages installed on your computer. Let us use the totem packages from RPM Fusion instead. From this step we will use yum. Close other applications that use yum in the background. Pirut - Add/Remove Software and Software Updater use yum as back end. You may also have to stop yum-updatesd daemon running on your computer.

yum remove totem totem-mozplugin totem-plparser xine xine-lib

Use these commands to kill the existing yum processes if you encounter any issues running yum.

killall yum-updatesd
rm /var/run/yum.pid

5. Download and install the codecs from rpm.livna.org.

yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-bad-extras gstreamer-plugins-ugly xine-lib-extras-nonfree totem-xine

6. Optionally download and install other media players.
a) Audicious

yum install audacious-plugins-nonfree-aac audacious-plugins-nonfree-alac audacious-plugins-nonfree-mms audacious-plugins-nonfree-mp3 audacious-plugins-nonfree-tta audacious-plugins-nonfree-wma audacity-nonfree

b) ffmpeg: FFMpeg is a complete and free Internet live audio and video
broadcasting solution. It can encode in real time in many formats including MPEG1 audio
and video, MPEG4, h263, ac3, asf, avi, real, mjpeg, and flash.

yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-libs ffmpeg2theora gstreamer-ffmpeg

c) mplayer

yum install mplayer mplayer-doc mplayer-gui mplayerplug-in gnome-mplayer

d) xmms

yum install  xmms-faad2 xmms-mp3 xmms-normalize

e) Rhythmbox

yum install rhythmbox-lirc rhythmbox-upnp

f) Others

yum install vlc

Launch your favorite multimedia application from the GNOME panel and play your favorite music or video.