Linux.Desktop.Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 69. Play Restricted Media Formats

For licensing reasons, not all distributions
come preconfigured to play several popular media formats.

Out of the box, many Linux distributions do not include support to
play a few restricted media formats, such as DivX, Windows Media (WMV), Quicktime,
and DVDs. The distros don't include the codecs to
play these formats due to licensing restrictions. However, you can
download the codecs yourself, and use them with media player
backends, such as mplayer and xine. Getting DVDs to play is a bit
trickier.

8.16.1. Playing non-DVD Media Formats

Mplayer is a cross-platform multimedia player that is quite popular
on Linux. The makers of mplayer host the sites where you can obtain
the codecs for media formats that aren't normally
supported on Linux. These codecs are usually the
Win32.dll files that are used on Windows
systems, and mplayer is programmed to let you use these codecs on
Linux. You can obtain the most commonly used media codecs by
downloading the essentials package from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/dloadl.
These codecs can be used with the other popular media player on
Linux, xine. Uncompress the download and put the contents in
/usr/lib/win32, which is where mplayer and xine
will look for codecs by default:

dbrick@rivendell:$ tar -jxvf  essential-20050216.tar.bz2
dbrick@rivendell:$ sudo cp  essential-20050216/* /usr/lib/win32/

Restart your media player, and you should now be able to play most
restricted formats. For a full list of formats that are supported,
visit: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/infol.

Mplayer and xine each have several frontend GUIs, such as kmplayer, kaffeine, namp, Totem, and oxine. So, regardless of the media player your distribution is configured to use, you can probably drop the codecs into the /usr/lib/win32 directory and have it just work.

8.16.2. Playing DVDs

Getting DVDs to play on your Linux box is usually a bit trickier.
Distributions, such as Suse, Mandrake, Fedora, and Debian, do not
provide support for DVD playback compiled into the binaries of their
media players (mplayer and xine usually). Your options are either to
compile the support into the players yourself or to find a binary
that already has it for you.

The best place I've found for instruction on DVD
playback is at http://www.geniusweb.com/LDP/HOWTO/html_single/DVD-Playback-HOWTO/.
By using the instructions on this website, you should be able to get
DVD playback working for most distributions. For each distribution,
there are usually several links that take you to download sites where
you can get the latest packages of the media players or required
libraries. Read each section carefully, and make sure you are
installing only what is necessary to enable a particular media player
backend; there is no need to perform the instructions for both
mplayer and xine if you are only using one. The instructions also
push the
ogle
frontend. You should feel
free to use your preferred frontend it its place.

You'll notice that each
distribution's instructions have you install the
libdvdcss library. This library is used to
playback encrypted DVDs (which is nearly all of them), so it is a
requirement regardless of the backend you choose. In some countries,
it may be illegal to use this library.

DVD playback requires quite a bit of processing power. Depending upon
your setup, you may be able to get by with a processor as slow as
Pentium II 500Mhz, but you probably can't go any
slower than that. As mentioned on the website, you should also be
sure to enable DMA on your DVD drive [Hack #55] . If you
don't, you'll experience jerkiness
in your video playback regardless of processor speed.

David Brickner