hi!

i have a problem with audio & video in linux

my friends are not enthusiastic linux-users, but, they are forced to work on linux (once in a while) by the instructors

so they, install linux & boot it, grudgingly, .... so, while they are at it, they want to listen to music, watch movies while they work

but, the distributions we have in our college (fedora core & suse linux--9.2, 9.3) suck badly in terms of mp3 playback ... also, at playing .DAT movie files

(but, the sound cards work well ....they play .wav sounds etc)

then, they bug me endlessly to make me play their songs on linux,
inspite of my repeated protests that I dont listen to music etc ... & i dont even have a speaker!

so, PLEASE give a list of sofware, so that i can play the following multimedia files
.mp3
.DAT
.mpeg
divx coded .avi


thanks a lot

Try mplayer (www.mplayerhq.hu) for movies, XmmS (http://www.xmms.org/) or AmaroK (http://amarok.kde.org/) for MP3

If your friends have internet connections then it may be easiest to set up software repositories so that they know where to get the packages, though the necessary packages may be on the install discs.

You should look into the three that C-RAF mentioned, but don't get them from the originator sites, they should normally be available as RPM packages on the install discs or from fedora and SuSE mirrors (again as RPM packages - and don't try to mix them, otherwise you may experience dependency problems).

It's my understanding that both Fedora and SuSE won't play mp3 "out of the box" as there are copyright issues.

Also, I can't say about how you might set the package management software to see repositories/mirrors for Fedora (never used it), but with SuSE (well 9.3 anyway) That advice came from a friend a couple of months ago when I was trying the SuSE 9.3 Pro - but I understand/recall that there are also directories there for 9.2 and possibly even 10 if anyone has that version.

Or if only one of them (or you) has the internet connection and a CDRW or DVDR/RW someone could download and install the packages for the various media players and then burn them to a disc for the others.


You would also have to install the "win32codecs" package(s). there maybe versions for the individual media player(s) or those distros may have win32codes for the whole distro.

I understand that normally you can get the media players to do the mp3, mpeg and avi stuff quite easily. DAT (digital audio tape ?????) I don't know. Sorry.

Maybe that helps a little.

regards

John