Getting Video Codecs in Fedora 9

Okk so you have your audio working, now its time for video. Fedora comes with a lot of good media players installed by default and many more can be installed. Some good players for linux are

• Totem Player  (Gnome’s default)
• Kaffeine (KDE’s default)
• VLC Media Player (not in default install)
• MPlayer (not in default install)

The players are good but they are not very much useful in the default install as the codecs, which provide them their juice, for most common formats are missing. There are two solutions to the problem. Provide the existing players the needed codecs or install player(s) with dedicated bundled codecs.

VLC media player comes in the second category. It comes with its own set of codecs and is actually a pretty good player, with some unusual features like software level audio amplification which can provide much higher volumes as compared to other players. Very useful for those low volume videos. It is available on livna repository so just configure livna on your machine and simple yum install vlc is the command.

Now for the providing codecs part. There are two rendering engines popular in linux, XIne and Gstreamer and codecs are available for both and most popular players can switch beteween the two. Some xine codecs are probably already there in your system through the xine-lib-extras and xine-lib-extras-nonfree packages installed for audio.

The MPlayer project maintains a great set of codecs for Mplayer which can also easily empower Xine engine. So my recommendation is to use those codecs for MPlayer as well as Xine. For Mplayer install following packages from Livna

• mplayer
• mplayer-gui

This will install the mplayer on your system. For the codecs go to http://www.mplayerhq.hu and download the latest Binary Codec package for your architecture. The Codec package is basically a compressed archive of the codecs so just extract its contents to the following directories (create if not present)

• /usr/lib/codecs
• /usr/local/lib/codecs

you can make links instead of two copies. The Xine engine is good to roll.

The gstreamer codecs are divided in three parts, the good, bad and ugly plugins. Good ones are installed by default. Ugly are the ones which are in good condition but can’t be shipped as default due to licencing issues, while bad are the ones which are in development phase or are not very well written. They are available through following packages.

• gstreamer-plugins-ugly
• gstreamer-plugins-bad
• gstreamer-plugins-bad-extras

Generally the ugly plugins will do the trick.

Choice of an engine or a Player is mostly personal choice. But i suggest installing plugins for both as this will help in other smaller issues like getting thumbnails for the videos in nautilus. I use Kaffeine with Xine and it works fine.

~ by Aman Manglik on June 26, 2008.