I am using Fedora 5. Now I can't run movies except .avi and .mpg. On the otherhand I can't run audio files except .wav and .mp3. I was trying to install the VLC media player downloaded from their web site. But during installation it says it need other files to be installed. How would I get all the prerequisites all together?

Please anybody describe how I will install media player with all sort of media support?

Thnaks in advance.

For the videos and the sond I would suggest mplayer, xine and win32codecs, wich are not included in the oficial distribution because of legal issues, I would suggest you to go to rpm.livna.org, which is an extra online repository wich offers aditional precompiled rpms that are not supported by fedora core. rpmseek.com can also bee a good source of precompiled rpms with additional abilities

if you're running fc5, you can add tons of software packages by running applications>add/remove software (assuming you're using gnome, as well)

if you search for vlc, it will find it and it will install complete with all the dependencies

(i'm *pretty* sure this is what i did....i know that i'm surprised at how many packages are available through this method....fc4 didn't have nearly as many packages available through its default repos as fc5 does...)

and as the other poster says, both mplayer and xine can be installed with the extra codecs, there are many howtos available here and throughout the net....



an excellent site for fc5 installs:




cheers,

Actually gstreamer is said to be the "best" backend for playing media files at the moment. Others are good too, I've tried many of them; yet gstreamer has proved to be quite a good one. Downsides are that, for example, the new Amarok can't handle gstreamer backend (not yet at least), so I was forced to use Xine in that matter instead on the pc I was operating.

The choices are multiple; like said, you could use Xine, mplayer, gstreamer or some other program as the backend and choose your frontend pretty freely depending on what you like. gstreamer says it can handle virtually every format out there; that's a small white lie I think (didn't play some very new wma?) but it's mostly true. Xine can handle a lot of stuff too, but there're something it cannot play (not that the new updates couldn't fix that).

Try out Xine or gstreamer. Mplayer is a nice one, but seems rough to me

EDIT: and if I wasn't clear enough, I was talking about backends; that is, programs that do the job. Frontends, on the other hand, are like nice covers you can choose, that operate the backend program and thus give you the enjoy. You can use multiple frontends on a single backend, and switching the backend affects the formats you can play, for example. Gstreamer is a good backend if your frontend (like Amarok player or Totem player) supports it. Just my opinion, though. As always.

Thanks a lot for your helping hand.

At last I found that rpms support for the media players is a bit poor. Another problem is the prerequisite library files are not included in those rpms most of the time.So, I rather downloaded the source files and install those.

One thing I had to do was to get the win32codecs directly from the mplayer website. The RPM I installed didn't have them all.

A test is (if you've paid the subscription, of course) is to try to listen to a ballgame on MLB.com. The codec for that stream wasn't a part of the RPM. It had worked perfectly in Slackware (where I'd compiled mplayer from source) but not in FC5 until I downloaded the full win32codec package.

Just to clarify a couple of things... Fedora has very good rpm support in the community. As was mentioned before this website ( http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_cor...ion_notes.html )has very good info as how to setup additional repositories. Personally I
like freshrpms since it has xine, vlc and mplayer packages along with all the dependencies. The other thing is that you only need the essential package from the mplayer site to support win32 codecs. MLB video and audio work great. PLAY BALL!