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