*.avi format?
 

Hi.

Where can i get codecs for a linux multimedia player which is able to play avi format, and which one is recommended?

Thanks.

gonna need some info.

what multimedia player?
do you have any installed?
what distro?


but generally, mplayerhq.hu is the place. under downloads, you will see a package called essential<date>. Thats probably the one you wan't.

If your going to use them with a xine based player, like gxine, xine, totem etc... , you need to extract the contents of the essential folder to /usr/lib/win32

MPlayer or Xine are the best.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html - a very featured player, will play just about all types of multimedia......once you install the codecs.

but will play 99.5% of all avi files you'll ever find ever ever without ANY external codecs at all.

Have MPlayer bzip downloaded, it has many files and directories and i'm not sure what to do next to make it work :(

that depends on what you have (distro?) and what you have installed.

typically you want to open a console and cd into the MPlayer-1.0-xxx directory and do the following:

./configure --help

that will give you the options you have.

for a basic setup to play music and movies this will do:

./configure --enable-gui

make

(as root) make install

but you need to give a little more info in order for us to help you.

it's fedora core 3 i'm using.

I've never used FC3 (or any fedora ) but alot of people on these forums say that yum is the way to go.

once you install it you can use it to retrieve and install programs for you like:

yum install mplayer

or something along those lines. Might be something you want to check into if you want to do this the easier way.

I'm installing it the way you said, after the install is finished i just execute the avi files as usual?

how can i access the MPlayer without executing the file first?

just run it... "mplayer"

which way, the manually compiled way or through yum?

if you did it through yum, its probably configured for you. look in your menu's.

from the command line, its a little harder but still pretty easy:
(NOTE: gmplayer is the graphical version and mplayer is the command line version)

gmplayer -vo x11 -ao oss -Skin Default <file>.avi

for help:

mplayer -vo help -- this will give you the available video drivers you can use
mplayer -ao help -- this will give you the available audio drivers you can use
mplayer --help -- this will give you the usage and some options
man mplayer -- this will give you the exhaustive list of options (its pretty long)

Also:

do you have xine (or a xine based player like gxine) also and installed the codecs like above (in /usr/lib/win32)?

this will only take a min. to do and will enable xine to play everything that mplayer will

if you want skins for the graphical version, go back to mplayerhq.hu and in the downloads section there are skins at the bottom. Extract them with tar, file-roller, ark, or whatever and place the directory in the .mplayer/Skin directory (the one in your home directory)

i managed to run a file with it (still didn't figure out how to use the skins though) but i have no sound, i checked the volume settings and it looks right but still no audio...
what could be the problem?

no i have some other players, and the directory of codecs i had to create myself (just followed what the installation told me). i managed to play a movie with a sound, i installed it all through command line and i guess it configured itself correctly.

i'll study it a little more, thanks for the push :)

Re: *.avi format?
 

I recommend VLC. It comes already supporting 99.9% of all media file formats (well, maybe not exactly 99.9, but the only format I've not been able to play on it is WMP9 format). You won't have to download any new codecs to get it to play what you need, plus it plays CDs and DVDs great too. I've used MPlayer and Xine before, but none of them compare, IMO, to VLC. Plus, VLC is cross-platform, so if you ever have to use a different platform (Windows, Mac, BSD, Pocket PC, etc), you can download the version for that OS, and have a familiar media player.

Re: Re: *.avi format?
 

Wow, I'm pretty stoked to see someone recommending this, I really wish this project would get more support from the community in general, to somehow make it more usable, more understood, more... accepted.

As for it being more usable than mplayer, that's a far cry from being true, but it certainly fills it's niche. ;)

Cool

Re: Re: Re: *.avi format?
 

VLC seems incredibly easy to use to me. By contrast, MPlayer has always felt sluggish and buggy to me. It occasionally drags, and I'm not too impressed with the interface. In fullscreen mode, sometimes the controls show up in the middle of the video, sometimes they don't. I've never had any of these problems wth VLC. I think VLC is the easiest to use video player for Linux that I've used. The interface is incredibly straightforward, just like any other program. Xine and MPlayer try to make themselves feel like you're using a DVD player, or something, but I find the simple interface with VLC much easier to use. Although, I will say that I've never tried to use it's streaming feature, which is definitely one of it's coolest features.

Glad to see you found a player working for you as good as mplayer does for me :)

Cool