Assuming that you have installed mplayer (as detailed above with apt-get) then the following TWO additional things, should allow you to play most wmv (windows media video) without too much problems in linux.
1. Install CODECS for mplayer
go here and download the mplayer codecs pack
[/url]http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.html
the ones you should download are called 'essential' codecs, here is a
direct link
once downloaded do as follows as normal user
Code:
bunzip2 -d essential-20041107.tar.bz2
tar xvf essential-20041107.tar
now that will create a directory in your home folder probably called something like
/home/anyweb/essential-20041107
once done, login as root (su -) and do this
Code:
mkdir /usr/lib/win32
cp /home/anyweb/essential-20041107/* /usr/lib/win32/
that's it, done !
2. Install the mplayer PLUGIN.
Now that you have the codecs, let us add a 'plugin' to FireFox, which will allow you to 'play' most Windows Media Videos directly in FireFox.
go
http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net/download.php and download the RPM for your distro, so if you are using Fedora Core Release 3 then get this one
[url=http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mplayer...86.rpm?download]http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mplayer...86.rpm?download
once you have downloaded the rpm, you'll need to install it as root, so login (su -) and do as follows
Code:
[root@localhost anyweb]# ls mp*
mplayerplug-in-2.75-0.FC3.i386.rpm
[root@localhost anyweb]# rpm -ivh mplayerplug-in-2.75-0.FC3.i386.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:mplayerplug-in ########################################### [100%]
[root@localhost anyweb]#
That's it, now close FireFox and restart it, go to some website that 'hosts' videos and try playing one.
mplayer should now open it and play it back within a FireFox window :)
cheers (and thanks to grep420 for the tip for where to stick the codecs for mplayer and thanks to Hijinks for the mplayer plugin link)
anyweb