WMVs/MP3s- Noob needs help
 

Hey guys. I'm sorry if this has been covered a million times, but when I look at old threads I really don't get a lot of that stuff. I'm completely new to linux, and can't even install new programs or any of that stuff.

I need to know how to play mp3s/wmvs. I know you need win32 codecs, but to me, this means nothing.

So if you could please take me through step my step, in laymans terms, it would be amazing, and I would have much gratitude for you.

Any other noob guides of info for installing stuff or whatever would also be great.

BTW, I'm running suse.

thanks!

hmb~

The thing is, those encodings (MP3 and WMV) are proprietary, that is, owned by the company or group that invented them. And those groups currently hold the licensing rights to the technologies - basically, distributions either have to bite the bullet and pay to include support for those codecs (several of the paid-for distributions do this) or not include them for fear of getting sued.

Of course, a lot of Linux users (rightly) think the whole witholding of technology is ridiculous, so have taken it upon themselves to derive Linux-compatible codecs and make them available for people to use. The hardest part is getting hold of them - you can download zipped up codecs from the MPlayer site, though if you're new to Linux you may have to go through a few steps to get them working with your player. Best bet is if you can get them through YAST - I'm no SUSE user, but I know that for Debian, Christian Marillat runs a repository where you can download them just like any other program. Anyone know if there's anything similar for SUSE?

I actually looked at the mplayer site, but I got confused when I tried to download. Theres a CH, HU, HU2, CH2, PL, in two different colums, HTTP and FTP.

SOme of this is fermiliar, but when I tried to download one randomly, it said the file couldnt be found.

I'm still lost. Sorry!

Yeah, that is a bit confusing... I have no idea what the CH and HU mean either; my only observation is that the top-level domain of the website is .hu, but then... ah well. HTTP is Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and is the way that packets are sent across a network when you're looking at web pages. FTP is File Transfer Protocol, and is used for sending files to and from other computers. That doesn't actually matter at all, since both you and the MPlayer server understand both and either will work well (the reason they give the choice is that some firewalls will block one kind of traffic but not the other). I like to let people know a little more than they need to, so as always feel free to skip or not understand this stuff. :)

Anyway, the link I randomly clicked on worked for me - try here for the "All codecs" package (probably the one you want).

Give me a shout if you're not sure what to do with them after you've tried to follow the installation instructions in the README.

CH, HU, HU2, CH2 Those are the mirror addresses the file can be downloaded from. All of them download the same file but from a different server.

Brian1

I downloaded the packagae from that link, but when I try to open it from the firefox downloads window, nothing happens.

Its in .tar.bz2 and I have no clue what to do.

That file you've downloaded is a tarball, basically a zip file for linux. If you're comfortable with the command line, then open up a console, change directory to where you downloaded the files (I'm afraid I can't remember where Firefox defaults to, as I change mine) and issue the commandand that will extract the file. (FYI - tar is the program for creating and extracting from these files; the arguments mean: x - eXtract (as opposed to create); v - be Verbose (so you can see what's going on); j - use BZip2 decoding (no idea why it's j); f - read from the following File)

If you're not comfortable with the command line, then there are graphical tools like KDE's Ark and GNOME's Archive Manager that will let you extract it. It is worth becoming at least slightly familiar with the command line, though, since it will always be there and advice you get will often give you commands to type.

Once you've extracted the contents, look in that directory (it'll be a subdirectory named after the file but without the .tar.bz2 suffix, if you used the tar command) and there will probably be a README file. With luck, that should tell you what to do with the extracted files so that mplayer can read them!