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Monday, April 7, 2008

Easy Media Codec Installation for Hardy Heron

This simple howto installs the most common restricted codecs in Heron, allowing you to play mp3, aac, DVD ,mp4, avi, wmv and many more formats. It also installs the codecs for ripping mp3s using the lame encoder and making DVD/CDs.

In a terminal type:
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg libxine1-ffmpeg libdvdread3

In order to play copyrighted DVDs, you need to install the libdvdcss2 package. To do this you need to install the Medibuntu repository. You can find my howto here.

Once you install the Medibuntu repository
To play encrypted DVDs, in a terminal type:
sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

To download the win32 codecs, in a terminal type:
sudo apt-get install w32codecs

To download the FFmpeg Encoders, in a terminal type:
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Red!
How is it in US? Is it really against the law when you install these codecs, even if only at home?
What a sad country it has to be due to all the patent rights....

mick said...

I am planning to do the Wubi Install and was wondering if my wireless will be easier to implement than with the regular Ubuntu install.

Anonymous said...

mickbw:
Why should your wireless be easier to implement?

And why install with wubi, anyway?

redDEAD said...

your wireless will not be easier to setup installing from wubi.

Unknown said...

Great guide. I am running Hardy Heron 64bit and had a error getting the w32codecs ("Package w32codecs is not available, but is referred to by another package.").
I got around this by running "sudo apt-get install non-free-codecs". This will install w32codecs for i386, w64codecs for amd64 and ppc-codecs for powerpc systems.

Unknown said...

Hey Reddead,

i'm a long time subscriber to your blog, and i wanna say thanks for doing such a great job with it.

One quick question.., i followed your codec guide, but the video quality on my xvids and dvds is poor, very pixelated. just wondering if this could be a codec issue (i'm pretty sure the ati restricted driver is installed correctly, compiz is working well). I'm out of ideas, I didn't have the same problem in Gutsy.

Either way, thanks again for the blog, very useful for Dell ubuntu users!

redDEAD said...

enda,

Unfortunately the driver causing everyone to get pixel pop-up when running Compiz. If you want kill Compiz when your watching a video (metacity --replace). The ATI driver is better than ever but still has a way to go.

Unknown said...

hey thanks,

even when i run that command i get pixelated video (even though compiz has been stopped). Is it weird that the driver didn't cause these problems in gutsy? has it taken a step back?

cheers,
enda

redDEAD said...

enda,

I forgot metacity --replace doesn't kill compiz process.

Try using the Compiz-Fusion Icon, it allows you to switch window mangers the right way, killing the compiz process. I'm doing an article on it later this week.

sudo apt-get install fusion-icon