So in this article I am going to discus how to install the necessary codecs to get these media types running in both Fedora 13 and Ubuntu 10.04.

A necessary proclamation

Unfortunately Linux is hindered by licensing issues. This is why you will be hard-pressed to find a major distribution that ships with pre-rolled in MP3 support. It’s frustrating, but it’s a reality when dealing with licenses. Does that mean you have to go without listening to MP3′s and other file formats? No. You can still enjoy them, you just have to install support for those tools yourself (or allow the system to install them).

Auto-install

This is especially true for Ubuntu 10.04. When you try to use a new media type in one of the players (such as Rhythmbox or Banshee), Ubuntu will attempt to install the necessary files, applications,. and/or codecs in order allow that media player to work with said multi-media file. This works most of the time. It’s only during those occasions which it doesn’t work that will have you frustrated because you can’t use that multi-media. Fear  not.

Figure 1

Fedora 13

There is a very simple tool, called AutoX (by Dangermous – no relation to the famous cartoon character), that you can use to install nearly any codec for Fedora 12 and 13 in both 32 and 64 bit versions. You can install it with the commands:

su

rpm -Uvh http://dnmouse.org/autoten-4.7-2.fc13.noarch.rpm

After you install, you run this with the command autoten as the root user. If you do not have all of the necessary dependencies, it will install them at first run. Once running you click on the button for the codec you want and it will install (see Figure 1). Very simple.

Ubuntu 10.04

With Ubuntu 10.04 you will have to issue a few commands to get your codecs installed. Before you run those commands you need to add repositories to apt. The command to add those repositories is:

sudo wget –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list

Now issue the command:

sudo apt-get –quiet update

Finally the next two commands will finish up the job:

sudo apt-get –yes –quiet –allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring

sudo apt-get –quiet update

You are ready to install the codecs. I will just list them out for you.

Non-free codecs: sudo apt-get install non-free-codecs

DVD support: sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 libxine1-ffmpeg gxine mencoder

Hopefully, after running the commands above, you should the codec you need installed OR now Ubuntu 10.04 should be able to auto-install any codec you need.

Final thoughts

Thanks to licensing issues it’s not a perfect world for Linux and multi-media, but it is getting close. With tools like you have above, getting your distribution up and running with multi-media isn’t all that challenging.

Installed Codec (via Shell Extension City) is another fine NirSoft tool that displays all installed codecs of a Windows 2000, 2003, XP or Vista system in a table. All meaning all Codec drivers and DirectShow but not binary codecs which are used by some applications like MPlayer.

The software lists the name of the codec, its installation path and file, the company that developed it and if it is enabled on the system. Each codec in the list can be disabled which has the effect that this codec will not be used to play the supported multimedia files. Excellent if you want to make sure that a specific codec is playing certain videos.

Removing some of the installed codecs can be achieved by disabling the codecs first and checking if the videos still play fine. If that is the case I would temporarily move them to another directory and if nothing bad happens delete them from the system. Most of the codecs installed on my Windows XP system are from Nero 8 which is kinda strange because I have not installed all those additional converters and tools that come with it. The codecs seem to get installed nevertheless.