Totem won't play common video formats
 

Debian Lenny Gnome
Intel Celeron, 1100MHz, 512k

Earlier today I downloaded a video of a Mozilla Project preview, in MP4. Of course, it won't play. All I get is the audio, and this error:

I put in some time, researching this issue, trying to figure it all out. I guess I'm looking in the wrong places. Is this a proprietary format issue?

Also, when I was overdosing on XP, my media drug of choice was Klite mega codec pack (from codecs.com). It literally plays every media format, audio and video.

In addition to fixing the above issue, can somebody guide me to an equivalent player with codecs for [insert any media type here]? I have several Terrabytes of various video and audio files, and prefer to not convert them all.

My understanding is that H264 is in about the same category as MP3: "proprietary" but there are open source software packages that implement it, which aren't included in many distributions because of "legal" reasons, but which can be freely downloaded and installed (if you can find them). To get the needed plugin for your Totem, try doing a google search for a DEB package using the keywords "totem, H264, plugin, deb"

From your signature, i guess you are running Debian.
Did you installed the Debian Multimedia package?
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Doc.../HowTo/Desktop
or here:
http://debian-multimedia.org/

Xode, No offense, man, but I have been doing Goooogles on the subject all day.
Being a novice Linux user, I don't understand all that I read. Also, I find downloads that I download, but not sure if I should install them. I am hoping a movie mongler would see this and have an easy answer for me. Exhausted...

Ahh, one source that I have not researched, THE source, SourceForge! Will report my findings!

The 2 links i give you are for basic codecs installation, you have no choice to install them or you will have to just stick to open source codec.

When you've followed the instructions for debian-multimedia, get VLC. I think that plays just about everything.

Ok, Davno, what's this mean:

As for the second link, Davno, That is THE reason for the other thread that I started. I couldn't get the .deb from that site to install.

Anyway... I'm more interested in post #8

Like it says, in the terminal as root, run:

I went completely through the Debian Multimedia box on that page.
Sometimes I see, what I believe to be, errors, and not sure if I should stop entering more commands...

and

I ran the apt-get update and got a repete, of course...

You want to install this first:
http://www.debian-multimedia.org/poo....10.16_all.deb

Just did that too, Brian (again, actually).
Still, none of the players including VLC will play the video, just the audio

Mmm, strange.
Try:

Install gstreamer codecs. [Even though VLC come with it's own codecs I don't know why it doesn't work.]
Install gstreamer-plugins-good/bad/ugly [Don't manually download the .deb packages as there are lots of dependencies to be downloaded, install using terminal]

Regards