Hi Guys,

I'm using FC5 at the moment and I think it's alright but I'm still learning. Two quick ones:

1. Is it me or do the Yum online repositories leave a bit to be desired? To be honest I haven't spent a lot of time playing around with it to possibly give it some more repo's to search but I thought the default ones would have more than they do. Maybe I'm using it wrong?

2. What's a good MP3/media player? A friend said VLC is good and MPlayer is supposed to be alright. I tried to install VLC but ran into dependency hell and Yum wasn't any help hooking me up with the needed packages (hence my above question ).


Thanks a lot!
Justin

Yum will be patchy for a while as the repos havn't all upgraded their packages. Keep an eye on www.fedorafaq.org for their yum.conf for FC5 when it arrives... any... time... now... with the FC5 FAQ. Also check out www.mjmwired.net, mjm is installing and testing FC5 now.

Patience is always needed with new releases of managed distros. As you guessed: you must install more repos. Even then, there's nothing like Debian's 13000 packages (and counting). OTOH: most stuff you need is on the DVD.

Generally - I use totem for most things. I have got totem gstreamer to play everything but dvd's (and the visualisation - goom - is utterly mindblowing). I use mplayer for that, and, while it is probably the best around, I do not recommend it. It is really a video editing tool rather than a dvd player so it dosn't support onscreen menues. For dvd's, look for anything Xine - based.

Oh - XMMS is supposed to be very nice now.

There are several repos that I added to try to combat all these issues with the "non-free" stuff. Freshrpms is an example. There are so many music and video players.... and don't forget all the KDE stuff, like amarok, (my fave) and kaffeine. For video, mplayer is my all-time favorite, and there's a site in Hungary that has ALL the codecs to make it play anything you can throw at it. Do a yum list >yum.txt and you can grep around in there for things you need. Hang in there, any really new distro goes through some growing pains for a while, but catch-up is inevitable.
Good Luck!

Cool thanks so much for the response!

I'll keep messing around but by the looks of it, but by the looks of it, I'll need a bit of patience using such a new distro.

Do you guys have any advice on the old dependency issue? Obviously when Yum can't find your package, you can normally find it on the web but then it hits you with all its dependencies and the dependencies dependencies etc etc.

Thanks
Justin

how do I get to the site in Hungary for Codec's? Will mplayer play quicktime based music video's after that such as on Yahoo's music video site?

It's a rare thing when i can't find it using yum. There are many repos for FC5, and more all the time. Now, a word of caution. When you do this, you are installing "non-official" packages and I have on rare occasion broken something in this way. Then, there's the double-install boogey-man.
Try this: www.mplayerhq.hu
Yes, quicktime codecs are incuded, along with weird ones, like matroska video, used here all of once.

Cool thanks I'll check that out!

Justin

See www.mjmwired.net notes on instaling mplayer from source. The approach will be the same for FC5 as it was for FC5. You will be visiting mplayerhq in the process.

I think there is an mplayer binary in the repos - don't touch it.

All the AV codecs are available in the regular repos list a-la the fedorafaq.

Not sure what the problem is. I installed mplayer and vlc using yum with no problems. If you set up a .repo file for freshrpms, then you'll have no trouble. Read "The easiest way to install freshrpm..."
http://freshrpms.net/

Thanks so much for your help guys!

All I did was install the freshrpm repository for yum and it finds pretty much anything i need.

Thanks again
Justin