Playing MP3's and WMA's in Fedora Core 4

This article is a result of a thread which started on my local LUG's (DALUG) mailing list. Following of these results should enable the ability to play mp3, wma and other types of music with licensing issues, on your fresh Fedora Core 4 installation.

Assumptions

• Your desktop environment is KDE
• You have already setup and internet connection
• You know how to enter commands into the command line
• Once you open a terminal, you should have the power of root
• You will be attempiting this with Fedora Core 4

Software involved

• GStreamer
• KPlayer
• Mplayer
• Yum

Prerequisites

Before embarking upon the steps detailed below, you should first have the Livna yum repository configured. To do this:

1. Open a terminal
2. Enter cd /etc/yum.repos.d
3. Then wget http://pembo13.dalive.com/linux/livna.org.repo

Enabling MP3 support in GStreamer

GStreamer is a streaming-media framework which is capable of handling both audio and video. Its plugin-based architecture means that new data types or processing capabilities can be added simply by installing new plugins. So in order to get MP3 and WMA support for any application which uses the GStreamer sound engine, one only need get the relevant plugins. There is a long list of applications which utilize GStreamer.

To ensure that you have gstreamer, and to install the necessary plugins:

1. Open a terminal
2. Enter yum install gstreamer gstreamer-plugins gstreamer-plugins-extra-audio

Enabling WMA support in GStreamer

You should already have GStreamer installed before you attempt these steps. At the time of my writing this, I could not find the necessary plugin in yum repository. As such, a more direct approach will be taken:

1. Download the plugin (in rpm form) either here or here.
2. Open a terminal
3. Change to the directory to which you downloaded the plugin
4. Enter rpm -ivh gstreamer-ffmpeg-0.8.4.1-0.2.fc4.i386.rpm

Enabling MP3 support in other KDE applications

A few of the simpler programs, such as Noatun and Juk, which are part of a base Fedora Core 4 install, can have mp3 support easily added to them:

1. Open a terminal
2. Enter yum install kdemultimedia-extras

Enabling a wide range of media support

If you want a wider range of media support, including the ability to view movies and play audio from within your browser the following steps will provide that ability. These steps install an application called Mplayer along with a plugin for it which goes into Mozila and/or Firefox:

1. Open a terminal
2. Enter yum install mplayer mplayer-fonts.noarch mplayer-gui mplayer-mencoder mplayerplug-in
3. Download the codec files from either here and here, or here and here.
4. Change to the directory to which you downloaded the codecs
5. Enter rpm -ivh mplayer-codecs-*.rpm

If you would also like to install a GUI, to make use of your newly installed media player, which is a bit more suited for the KDE environment, these steps will install KPlayer. KPlayer is simply a KDE application which interfaces with Mplayer:

1. Open a terminal
2. Enter yum install kplayer

Conclusion

The Fedora Project has decided not to directly put in any software or technologies that could bring about licensing issues, and make Fedora less free. Two of these technologies are MP3 and WMA decoding, which is what playing these file types are all about. Nevertheless, with a few simple steps, one can fill this void.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, corrections, or suggestions.

add a comment

visitor comments

Playing MP3's and WMA's in Fedora Core 4

There are no user comments for this page.