Hi there everyone, I'm new to this Linux lark (although I'm getting better) and I could use a little bit of help.

I'm using Fedora core 6 and I've got everything set up nicely except for some sort of music jukebox dealy. My first choice would be Rhythmbox (unless anyone can suggest something better!) I've also tried Banshee, Songbird and Jajuk.

The thing is though... none of them work! I can't get them to play my wma files or m4a files from my old windows partition. I understand that you need the GStreamer codecs too, and I think I've got them but it just doesn't work.

I installed GStreamer using the package manager, as well as all the plugins (including ffmpeg which I believe is for wma). Whenever I try to play one of these files, Rhythmbox just gives me an import error saying "The GStreamer plugins to decode "unknown" files cannot be found."

It's silly though, MPlayer and VLC can both play the WMAs so why can't this? Is there any way of using different codecs than the GStreamer ones? Like... to use VLC codecs?

My oggs and mp3s work fine by the way. I could theoretically just convert everything to ogg but it's not quite ideal; I want to be able to use lots of formats.

I thought perhaps it wasn't working because the ffmpeg thing hadn't installed properly or to the right directory. So I tried installing it from source, and got this error after doing the "./configure" :

checking for GST... no
configure: Package gstreamer-0.10 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gstreamer-0.10.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'gstreamer-0.10' found
configure: error: no gstreamer-0.10 >= 0.10.4 (GStreamer) found


I need help. This is stressful! lol

Thanks, Fraser

I don't suggest compiling them from source; your problem is probably just that you need to point the correct path (which is not where the configure script is looking from by default), but anyway, it's a lot easier to install and maintain using binary packages.

You should know that on Linux and especially in this case Rhythmbox and equivalents are nearly always mere front-ends. They don't actually play the files, they use an engine or backend of some kind to do the decoding job and playing job, and give you interface to control stuff; therefore you'll want the codecs and plugins for the backend. There are of course several backends, two biggest (I believe) are Xine and GStreamer. Before continuing installing everything you see, find out which one your system actually uses; is Rhythmbox (which is nice app if you ask me) using Xine or GStreamer as it's backend? Both are good backends, but they use different plugins; Xine uses it's own libraries (some distributions call them libxine-extracodecs, some xinelibs-extras, ...) and GStreamer it's own (those you probably installed: gstreamer-plugins-ugly, gstreamer-plugins-bad, ...) If you're using Xine backend it's no use installing GStreamer plugins for MPlayer you can also install w32 codecs (dll files and so on, Windows codecs) and I guess Xine can use them too, but GStreamer probably won't.

Check out Rhythmbox configuration windows or diagnostic or verbose messages to determine the backend it uses; verify then that you have plugins/codecs for that backend and you should be fine.

Thanks very much for your reply.

I'm fairly sure it's a gstreamer backend. The errors it gives always includes the word gstreamer and when I type gstreamer --help in the terminal it gives options for gstreamer.

How do I make the configure script point to the correct path? Or... are my gstreamer codecs not stored in the usual place?