I got RealPlayer to work and come to find out it will not play my mpeg video files. what will?

Xine, MPlayer and Videolan.

MPlayer, Totem etc etc should all play your MPEG files. Have you installed all necessary codecs?

well I am not familiar with linux yet so some of that codec stuff will be confusing to me in linux. but it is also harder for me because I have not obtained the drivers for my modem so i am unable to connect to the internet in linux, so I have to switch between linux and windows to get on the Internet and pressing the update button on the software won't do anything in linux because of that, so I will have to get all of the updates and codecs and burn them to a cd and boot into linux and figure out a manual way to install them.

It's not very helpful if you do not state which distro you are using. Perhaps you could add that to your profile? Also, maybe it would be more profitable in the long run to get your modem working first. You can concentrate on codecs once you have the ability to download them. I do not wish to sound unhelpful but that's how I would approach your problem.