Playing Movie in Ubuntu

Ubuntu default player is Totem Movie Player, however it only can support few video/audio format such as AVI and MP3 by default installation. To make it support more format, open then Package Manager, click the Sound and Video category, search the key word GStreamer. Tick all the GStreamer plugins and install them. Then you can play almost all kind of video with Totem Movie Player except RMVB/RM (Real alternative).



To play RMVB/RM format, I found one video player which as these codecs. The MPlayer. First of all, use the Package Manager to install the MPlayer Movie Player. Then download and MPlayer Binary Codec Packages. Extract them...

command for 32bit user:-

tar xvjf essential-20071007.tar.bz2

cd essential-20071007


command for 64bit user:-

tar xvjf essential-amd64-20071007.tar.bz2

cd essential-amd64-20071007


and copy them into /usr/lib/codecs. If /usr/lib/codecs directory does not exist then create it.

sudo mkdir /usr/lib/codecs

sudo cp * /usr/lib/codecs


NOTE: you may need to install libstdc++5 to get .rmvb files to play. Even though it might not be necessary for you, it can’t hurt to install (the package isn’t very big). Run the command: sudo apt-get install libstdc++5 in a Terminal.

Now open the MPlayer (Applications->Sound and Video->MPlayer Movie Player) . Right click in the Mplayer and select Preferences from the menu.


Go to the Video tab, set the Available drivers: xv X11/Xv.

Then at the Codecs & demuxer tab, set the Video codec family to RealVideo decoder and Audio codec family to FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders.


Restart your MPlayer, and test play a RMVB/RM file.



Additional information:-

The Flash plugin for Firefox may be overwrite after installed these codecs, so you have to redo the Flash plugin again. (Refer to Installing Flash Player 10 64bit) If you still have the Flash plugin file - libflashplayer.so, then just simply copy it to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ and redo the nspluginwrapper again.

Sample code:-

sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

sudo nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/