Somewhere I'm missing an essential step in installing the plugins. I have FC9 and a yum search shows that I have the major plugins - gstreamer, xine - installed on my system. I did a yum install and they were already installed.




However they do not show up in totem/preferences and the player objects to all major formats - mpeg, quicktime, wmv. Here's a verbose error message:

[olin@localhost ~]$ totem --gst-plugin-spew
** Message: don't know how to handle video/mpeg, mpegversion=(int)1, systemstream=(boolean)false
** Message: don't know how to handle audio/mpeg, mpegversion=(int)1
** Message: Error: You do not have a decoder installed to handle this file. You might need to install the necessary plugins.
gstplaybasebin.c(2284): prepare_output (): /play

** Message: Missing plugin: gstreamer|0.10|totem|MPEG-1 Audio decoder|decoder-audio/mpeg, mpegversion=(int)1 (MPEG-1 Audio decoder)
** Message: Missing plugin: gstreamer|0.10|totem|MPEG-1 Video decoder|decoder-video/mpeg, mpegversion=(int)1, systemstream=(boolean)false (MPEG-1 Video decoder)
** Message: Automatic missing codec installation not supported (helper script missing)
...

What am I missing?

An alternative idea

If you would consider another player, I would suggest vlc, which plays almost anything. If it is for fedora, there is this link.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-fedora.html

vlc apparently also works in solaris, but I am without experience in either of these, being a user of 0penSUSE 11.0. Otherwise, Luck

Thanks. VLC seems to work very well, and is far more configurable than mplayer.
Totem has an interesting plugin for youtube, but I can't make that work either.