Linux Desktop Hacks

Play Restricted Media Formats #69

Chapter 8, Desktop Programs

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HACK

Uncompress the download and put the contents in /usr/lib/win32, which is

where mplayer and xine will look for codecs by default:

dbrick@rivendell:$ tar -jxvf essential-20050216.tar.bz2

dbrick@rivendell:$ sudo cp essential-20050216/* /usr/lib/win32/

Restart your media player, and you should now be able to play most

restricted formats. For a full list of formats that are supported, visit: http://

www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/info.html.

Mplayer and xine each have several frontend GUIs, such as

kmplayer, kaffeine, namp, Totem, and oxine. So, regardless

of the media player your distribution is configured to use,

you can probably drop the codecs into the /usr/lib/win32

directory and have it just work.

Playing DVDs

Getting DVDs to play on your Linux box is usually a bit trickier. Distribu-

tions, such as Suse, Mandrake, Fedora, and Debian, do not provide support

for DVD playback compiled into the binaries of their media players

(mplayer and xine usually). Your options are either to compile the support

into the players yourself or to find a binary that already has it for you.

The best place I’ve found for instruction on DVD playback is at http://www.tldp.

org/HOWTO/DVD-Playback-HOWTO/index.html. By using the instructions on

this website, you should be able to get DVD playback working for most distri-

butions. For each distribution,