where can i download audio and video free codecs to use
with all linux distro

free? where would you pay for them?? mplayer has a lot of codec packs which are commonly used. check their site.

Most of the codecs available for Linux are not available as separate "codecs", as such. They are usually built into the libraries supporting the core multimedia programs, such as xine, gstreamer, vlc, and mplayer/ffmpeg/libavformat. There are several "cross-pollination" plugins that can let one player use the other player's codec libraries, however. In addition there are many separate format libraries, such as liblame for mp3 and faac/faad for the aac audio format, that can be used both independently and by media players.

Finally, there are a few proprietary codecs that just aren't available as "Free" packages, but can be used in a Linux system. There's a realplayer available for Linux, and some players can use certain win32 codecs, packages of which are available from the mplayer project (note that most of these will not work on 64bit systems).

Yes, I was only referring to windows codecs, as that's the only thing that ever gets referred to as "packs" and such in the first place...

Download the all or essential pack from here:
http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/

If you download the all pack (which I usually do), I would recommend the one all-20061022.tar.bz2 because the newer wmv codec has problems. But if you want try the new one.

Oh, and what to do with this, well mplayer and xine usually check '/usr/lib/codecs' or '/usr/lib/win32', so you can either extract them to there or what I do, symlink '/usr/lib/codecs' to somewhere in your home directory so you can swap them out easier (this won't work well for multi-user systems tho).

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