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For the sake of making a long story short, patent and copyright restrictions, complicates Ubuntu distributing software to support proprietary formats such as DVD, MP3, Quicktime, Windows Media, and others. Now, Ubuntu has made a commitment to include only completely free software by default meaning that proprietary media formats as the ones mentioned above are not configured ‘out of the box’. Ubuntu can certainly play these popular non-free media formats, once configured, but in order to keep things on the uppity up in the legal department they just leaves these codecs out.

While we are dealing with the codes and css for these popular formats we are also going to install MPlayer so that we can enjoy them in firefox as well. MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE (2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs. MPlayer is the swiss army knife for audio and video formats on linux. It’s also able to convert any supported files to raw/divx/mpeg4 AVI (pcm/mp3 audio), and even video grabbing from V4L devices.

Install Mplayer in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

Before you start you need to make sure you have enabled the Universe and multiverse repositories for apt.

    sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list

Make sure you have the following two lines included somewhere near the bottom.

    ....
    deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jaunty universe multiverse
    deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jaunty universe multiverse
    ....

Now we are going to install everything

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install mplayer

Mplayer will be located here: Applications—>Sound&Video—> Mplayer Movie Player
Now optionally you can install another more pleasant front-end if you wish I prefer and use smplayer here, but you could easily use gnome-mplayer:

    sudo apt-get install smplayer
    sudo apt-get install smplayer-themes

Install libdvdcss2 and w32 video codecs in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

Support for WMV, RealMedia and other formats has been bundled into the w32codecs package. This package is not available from the Ubuntu repositories due to licensing and legal restrictions.To play encrypted DVDs, the libdvdcss2 package is essential.

    sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/jaunty.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring
    sudo apt-get update

For i386 users you will use the following command to install the codecs.

    sudo apt-get install w32codecs libdvdcss2

Amd64 users will install the codecs with the following command

    sudo apt-get install w64codecs libdvdcss2

This should hook you up with just about all the codecs you need for everyday life.

Mplayer Plugin for Firefox

If you want to install the Mplayer plug-in for Mozilla Firefox the following command will do it.

    sudo apt-get install mozilla-mplayer

Enjoy and Have a Good’n!