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How to play music and video(MP3, MPEG, AVI, FLV and other multimedia files) in Fedora 12?

Due to patent encumbrance codecs required to play some proprietary file formats are not shipped with Fedora. Codecs are the programs that encode and decode digital data. These codecs are available in the rpmfusion repository for Fedora. You will be able to play mpeg, mp3, avi, flv and other commonly used file formats for music and video. You will require an Internet connection to download and install these packages on your computer.

Let us get started. Are you ready?

Playing music and video in Fedora 12

1. Open a terminal and switch to root user.
Launch the terminal from the panel menu
Click Applications->System Tools->Terminal
On the terminal type:

su -

2. Check whether sound is properly configured on your system.

play /usr/share/sounds/gnome/default/alerts/bark.ogg 

If you hear sounds proceed further. Otherwise check volume control and sound devices configuration. Below is the output when you play the wav sound file from the terminal.

/usr/share/sounds/gnome/default/alerts/bark.ogg:
 
  Encoding: Vorbis        
  Channels: 2 @ 16-bit   
Samplerate: 48000Hz      
Replaygain: off         
  Duration: 00:00:00.54  
 
In:100%  00:00:00.54 [00:00:00.00] Out:26.0k [      |      ] Hd:3.8 Clip:0    
Done.

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

4. Update the system

yum update -y

5. Remove the totem and xine packages installed on your computer. Let us use the totem packages from RPM Fusion instead. From this step we will use yum. Close other applications that use yum in the background. Pirut - Add/Remove Software and Software Updater use yum as back end. You may also have to stop yum-updatesd daemon running on your computer.

yum remove totem totem-mozplugin totem-plparser xine xine-lib

Use these commands to kill the existing yum processes if you encounter any issues running yum.

killall yum-updatesd
rm /var/run/yum.pid

6. Download and install the codecs from rpmfusion

yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-bad-extras gstreamer-plugins-ugly

7. Optionally download and install other media players.
a) Audicious

yum install audacious-plugins-wavpack audacious-plugins-vortex audacious-plugins-uade audacious-plugins-sid audacious-plugins-metronome  audacious-plugins-jack audacious-plugins-freeworld-wma audacious-plugins-freeworld-tta audacious-plugins-freeworld-mp3 audacious-plugins-freeworld-ffaudio audacious-plugins-freeworld-alac audacious-plugins-freeworld-aac audacious-plugins-freeworld audacious-plugins-esd audacious-plugins-amidi audacious-plugins audacious-plugin-xmp audacious-plugin-fc audacious-libs audacious-devel audacious

yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel ffmpeg-libs ffmpeg2dirac ffmpeg2theora

c) mplayer

yum install gnome-mplayer gnome-mplayer-nautilus mplayer mplayer-doc mplayer-gui

d) xmms

yum install  xmms-mp3 xmms-mplayer xmms2 xmms2-freeworld xmms2-mp4 xmms2-mac xmms2-mad xmms2-nonfree 

yum install rhythmbox-lirc rhythmbox-upnp 

yum install vlc