How to Install Audio & Video Players in Linux

Before you add repositories it's probably a good idea to make sure your system is fully updated first. At this point I'm prefering the Livna repository as it's the most useful and complete but at some point I might need to add another one for things that are lacking there. The easiest way to get started is to install the livna-release packages:

# rpm -ihv http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm

Install MP3 Plug-in

Since you've been following along this next step is about as easy as it gets. Just use yum  to automatically install the MP3 plug-ins for xmms and Rhythmbox like this:

# yum -y install xmms xmms-mp3 xmms-faad2 gstreamer-plugins-ugly \
 gstreamer-plugins-bad libmad libid3tag

While you're here you might as well install my personal favorite (this week at least) music player Banshee:

# yum -y install banshee

The -y  flag is to automatically answer yes to any question. If you want to be able to say no you can ignore that flag. While you're there I highly recommend the grip CD ripper which supports both MP3 and Ogg formats. Once again installation is quite simple:

# yum -y install grip

Install DVD player
Currently I find the DVD player that works best is the
Xine Multimedia Player
which is found in the Livna repository so installing it is
just this simple:

# yum -y install xine xine-lib xine-skins xine-lib-extras-nonfree libdvdcss

This will install the xine DVD/VCD/CD player.
Now to get xine to automatically play a DVD upon insertion instead
of the Totem player which can't actually play DVDs, you can simply
use the gconftool-2 utility as follows:

$ gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/volume_manager/autoplay_dvd_command \
'xine --auto-play --auto-scan dvd' --type='string'

Install MPlayer Media Player

At some point you're probably going to want to play a QuickTime,
AVI or ASF file so you'll want the MPlayer media player.  Fortunately
with the FreshRpms repositories it's also very easy to download and
install.

Then you can go ahead and install mplayer and all it's dependencies:

# yum -y install mplayer mplayer-gui mplayer-skins mplayer-fonts mplayerplug-in
 
This command line will download the whole kit and kaboodle, command line
utilities, plug-ins, etc.
If you want to play content from a command line you will want to use
the gmplayer  version which will include
a skin-able control panel.
Restart your web browser after that whole mess is done installing and
you'll also have a plug-in for Mozilla so you can play embedded content.
While you're at it be sure to configure mplayer
to use the Pulse sound system rather than the default.  It just works better.

Edit the file ~/.mplayer/config and add the following line:
ao=pulse

You can enable support for mms streaming by opening Firefox and click on the special URL about:config. Right click on the list and choose New then choose String. For the preference name enter network.protocol-handler.app.mms then for the string value enter gmplayer.
Special 64-bit instructions:
The above installs the 64-bit version of everything but because your other plug-ins are 32-bits you need to run the 32-bit version of Firefox, which won't be able to use the 64-bit version of the plug-in you just installed. The plug-in can use the 64-bit version of the mplayer application just fine so all you need to do then is to install the 32-bit mplayerplug-in plus a dependency it requires. If you know of any easier way to do this please let me know below.
# rpm -ihv http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/7/mplayerplug-in/mplayerplug-in-3.40-1.fc7.i386.rpm And finally you'll probably also want some additional codecs to play all that proprietary video that seems to have infected the Internet. Go to the MPlayer Download page and find the Binaries Codec Package section then follow the link for codecs directory. There you will grab the latest all codecs file. You'll need to install those files in /usr/local/lib/codecs. Here are the steps. Remember the exact file names may change at some point. If you also installed xine you will need a symlink since it expects codecs to be in a different directory. # gtar xjvf all-20071007.tar.bz2 # mv all-20071007/* /usr/local/lib/codecs # ln -s /usr/local/lib/codecs /usr/lib/codecs # ln -s /usr/local/lib/codecs /usr/local/lib/win32

Install VLC (VideoLAN Client)

Multimedia can be the achilles heel of Linux, but with just a little work you should be able to play just about anything your friends can. Besides Mplayer the other great video player is called VLC. It too is trivially easy to install once you have your repositories set up:

# yum -y install vlc

Once the client and a zillion dependencies get installed you can play a huge variety of video formats easy with the command vlc 

Install RealPlayer 10 Media Player

This one is a little tricky only because the latest official release is horribly out of date and doesn't even use ALSA for sound. So rather than deal with annoying workarounds I think the easiest thing to do now is to just use the latest daily build that's available. I'm currently using RealPlayer-10.1.0.3114-20070503.i586.rpm which you can just download and install. This one pretty much "just works" and doesn't seem to have any bugs I can see.
Just install it:

$ rpm -ihv RealPlayer-10.1.0.3114-20070503.i586.rpm

Then whenever you want to view something just use /usr/bin/realplay. Here is a link to a cute test video to make sure it's working for you. If you also installed Mplayer above then you will likely run into a problem where the Mplayer provided Real Media plug-in will be run instead of the one installed by the RealPlayer package. The mplayer verison of the plug-in does not work correctly in most cases and causes more problems than it solves. The only way I've found to get rid of it is to just simply delete the plug-in files:

# cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
# rm mplayerplug-in-rm.*

You'll of course need to do that again should you re-install or upgrade the mplayer plug-ins.