so I have MPlayer installed, and I got my mozilla plugin to play embedded movies, everything's great. BUT. When I went to channel101.com, thier movies had video, but no sound. Since my sound card crisis has been resolved, this leads me to believe that I lack codecs needed to play the MPEG4's (I think that's what .mp4 would indicate) in Mplayer. Now, I went to the mplayerhq website, downloaded the "essential codecs" package, and extracted it's contents to /usr/lib/codecs (having created the directory 'codecs' in the process.) The movies still have no sound. The README said that prepackaged Mplayer packages (what I got off of RPMdrake) would "most likely" look for codecs in /usr/lib/codecs, but I'm not sure if a.) it can't find them there, or b.) that package did not contain the codec I need to view the Quicktime files.

Any ideas on how to fix either scenario?

Do you have that problem with local file?

my suggestion, install all the codecs. get the tarball :
http://www4.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/rel...050412.tar.bz2

and copy all the files to
/usr/local/lib/codecs/

that should hopefully do the trick, on FC4 at the least.

EDIT: nevermind. I'll try that, and let you know how it goes...

Aagh. That didn't seem to do the trick either. Might it be a possible idea to move all the files I stuck in usr/lib/ codecs to /usr/local/lib/codecs? Also, why is it that many of the files that were in the "essentail codecs" are .DLLs? Are those not Windows things? The README seems to specifically say that these won't work with windows applications, so I'm a bit confuddled...

mplayer can use those .dll files for codecs

Hmm... the usr/local/lib/codec directory seems to be intended for when Mplayer is compiled from source... usr/lib/codec the README says is more what I'm looking for. However, is there a way of telling Mplayer where to look for the codecs?

Maybe you could try to install divx or xvid codecs. put it in the same directory the other mplayer codecs are at so mplayer can make use of it. I'm not sure if it would work I never had this problem b4 but it's worth trying.

my codecs are stored in /usr/lib/win32

try doing a symbolic link for it:

ln -s /usr/lib/codec /usr/lib/win32

i dont think that would work. if memory serves right, the /win32 dir is used by players like Xine but not MPlayer. mst3kman, why dont u try installing xine instead, i changed from MPlayer to Xine a few months back and think its a more superior player ( for general use at least )

During ./configure MPlayer will look for those codecs at $prefix/lib/codecs, if the codecs exist in other path than that you should pass it to the configure script, otherwise, win32 codecs support will not be compiled. As for xine the codecs can be placed anywhere, but you have to set the codecs path in xine's config file.

Hmm.... upon closer investigation, it seems the codecs I got from mplayerhq were intended for the ourpose of compiling the thing from source. I simply installed Mplayer from RPMDrake; I'm making progress with CLI, but as of yet compiling source code is well above my head.

How might I go about simply installing codecs for a pre-assembled Mplayer? Because putting them in the /usr/lib/codecs directory doesn't seem to be doing the trick at all... (and I've tried the other aformentioned directories, too...)

I dont think theres anything about the codecs being ment for use only during compilation mate, i used the codecs for my Xine player which in installed using the YUM repos.

ok here goes, just try doing the following steps completely. you are starting out from the directory where the codecs are placed ( ur home folder most probably ) so here goes :


mkdir /usr/local/lib/codecs/

cp *.* /usr/local/lib/codecs/

cd /usr/local/lib/codecs/

chmod 755 /usr/local/lib/codecs/*

mkdir /usr/lib/win32

cp /usr/local/lib/codecs/* /usr/lib/win32


i have a hunch that you did not set the permissions for the codecs (chmod 755 /usr/local/lib/codecs/*) if so, ur codecs have been in the right place, just that MPlayer dint have the permisions to access them.

Hope this helps.