VLC and MPEG 4 codec

sephstorm · 10-03-2010, 07:12 AM

When I try to open some video files in vlc on linux, I get the message "[insert media name] requires and additional plugin to play this file. The following plugin is required: MPEG-4 AAC decoder"

now I looked at the VLC wiki and the vlc sit and they say that vlc supports mpeg4 audio playback, what am I missing here?

http://wiki.videolan.org/MPEG-4#Accepted_audio_codecs
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.php?cat=audio

Also if I search for a plugin, the only one that comes up is a GStreamer media framework "bad" plugin. After looking up what that means, I don't think im interested in downloading it.

David the H. · 10-03-2010, 07:32 AM

AAC support is provided by the external faac and faad libraries (for encoding and decoding). You should be able to find the packages in your repositories, but I don't know the exact names Fedora uses.

Edit: actually, now that I think about it, I'm not sure about vlc. It generally builds in support for its codecs. Still, it can't hurt to try installing faad anyway.

Edit2: Yes, I was correct the first time. vlc does use faac/faad. http://wiki.videolan.org/Advanced_Audio_Coding