Video players.
 

Hi all.
I am new to Linux and i need some help on how to play video files in linux. Am using RH9 on a virtual machine.
I have tried playing a .vob and .dat video files on system but anytime i tried i get some error messages such as this. "Nautilus has no installed viewer capable of displaying "/mnt/cdrom1/MPEGAV/AVSEQ01.DAT".
I have tried downloading some players but nothing seem to be working.
I will be grateful if anybody could help me out
Thanks.

Hi, and welcome to LQ!

With most players, you need to install codecs (gstreamer-bad, gstreamer-ugly, dvdcss2, etc) to play proprietary media.

Cheers

Also, do you really need Red Hat 9? Is there a reason you can't install a newer distribution?

Running something as old as RH9(hit end of life in 2003?) it will be virtually impossible to get any current video player to run on it. You would need to install a video player from circa 2003 in order to make it work. Figuring out hwat palyers were around back then will be one problem. Figuring out how to make them run on RH9 will be another. Finding someone that has done and still remembers what had to be done will be pretty unlikely.

If you are just looking for a free RH version of linux there are current alternatives. Fedora is basically RH's developement platform. There are two major(depending on point of view) problems with Fedora. First Fedora is a bleeding edge distro, which means that the users often encounters issues which no one has faced before. This is really not so bad as it is a relatively rare occurance and (for most issues) the developers are internested in resovling the issue. The second problem is that each version is only supported for 13 months. After that it is recommended that you do a clean install of the currently supported version.

Centos is another altenative. Centos is RHEL(Red Hat Enterprise Linux) with the propeietary bits stripped out(mostly logos). Its only major problem(for some) is that same as RHELs. The kernel and packages are older than what will be found in Fedora. This is becuase they have been thoughly tested(which takes time). To get a picture of what kind of time frame we are talking about consider that a new version of Fedora is released about every six months(roughly). RHEL6 was released recently and was based on Fedora 12, Fedora 14 was also recently released. RHEL/Centos5 was based on Fedora Core 6. Fedora 7-11 had some pretty serious stability issues which delayed the release of RHEL6, by schedule it should have been based on Fedora 9. RHEL/Centos has a five year plus support life.