Can someone please help me with re-pointing my totem to my codecs. They still exist but Totem cannot find my codecs since I installed mplayer. I have searched the best I can but to no avail.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Did you try re-installing totem? Synaptic offers that option.

Well? Did you try that & did it work? Did you find some other fix?

Please let us know, it may help someone else.

You could also be a bit more specific about the problematic situation..installing mplayer should not, as far as I know, move any existing files around or do anything about them, and since the "codecs" are merely files (like everything on Linux), I find it odd if installing mplayer could somehow deny Totem's access to the codecs. Does Totem even use the same codecs mplayer does (it won't, unless you're using Xine as Totem's backend, and use the w32codecs package from mplayer for Xine also -- but this doesn't change the fact that both programs should be able to use the files).

So, things to check:
- what backend your Totem (which is a front-end to some player engine) uses; Xine or gstreamer maybe? Check what package is installed -- since the backend is probably configured during build-time, the package may be called totem-xine or totem-gstreamer depending on which engine it uses.
- Does Totem actually use the codecs you are talking about, and what codecs are those? Where are they installed (for example w32codecs, which are binary files, can be copied to different locations depending on what you want)?
- Did you do other things than just install mplayer when the codecs stopped working?
- Are the codecs still on your system?
- Is mplayer working properly, maybe with the codecs you're talking about?

The easiest method, which of course won't reveal the reason for this problem if it works, is to reinstall the codecs, Totem, Totem's backend or them all. Try to find the real reason and fix this problem some other way, it's more helpful for you and to others [as long as you post your solution here].

The way it works in Linux is that:
- you can have several players (engines, backends, programs that do the real job) that don't usually know or care about each others' existence, as long as their files don't overlap, and maybe even then if the overlapping files are identical
- you can have several front-ends (user interfaces to control backends, the engines..) for a backend, again these are pieces of software that don't care about each other
- you can have codecs, binary files or library files that "extend" the player engines to be able to play more formats than they could without; these codecs don't usually know or care how many programs use them, or if anyone uses them

So..to conclude, you can have tons of software to play media, codecs for that software, interfaces for the player software, and so on - and as long as you don't overwrite/delete any files of them, they should be able to work all together. If your codecs suddenly stopped working, it's either a bad setting, renamed/removed file, permissions problem or something equal. Shouldn't be a mystery like it often is in Windows, where you can't easily see "under the hood".