How-To: Get Full Multimedia Support in Ubuntu and Unlock FFmpeg
This is probably the most important guide to any Desktop Linux user who wants to work with and playback a variety of multimedia files on their system. As you know, most of the popular codecs/formats (i.e. MP3, AAC, DVD, H.264, Flash, etc.) are not included in Ubuntu or other Linux distributions because they’re proprietary and require licensing. Fortunately, however, the Ubuntu community has gone through great strides to make acquiring them a lot easier – although still technically illegal if you live in the United States (my 2-cents: playback codecs should be free to acquire for personal use, especially those that become industry standards).
So lets get down to the nitty gritty.
Multimedia Support – Except for Movie DVDs:
Fire up Synaptic and click Package > Settings > Repositories and go ahead and tic off all available repositories including Multiverse.
Search for ubuntu-restricted-extras and click to install. Description: “Installing this package will pull in support for MP3 playback and decoding, support for various other audio formats (gstreamer plugins), Microsoft fonts, Java runtime environment, Flash plugin, LAME (to create compressed audio files), and DVD playback.”
Previously I posted an exhaustive guide on how to do this with Ubuntu Edgy & Dapper on eHomeUpgrade. Thank God things have changed!
Movie DVD Playback Support via Mediabuntu Repository:
First you need to add the Mediabuntu repository to the sources list via the Terminal. The easiest way to do this is by following the instructions from Mediabuntu specific to the version of Ubuntu you’re running. If you’re running Gutsy 7.10 then it would be:
$ sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
$ wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
Now to install the package that will allow you to playback encrypted DVDs (i.e. movie DVDs you rent or buy):
$ sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2
Acquire an Unlocked, Fully Enabled Version of FFmpeg:
Grabbing FFmpeg from Mediabuntu is critical (see steps above) if you want to encode videos to H.264/AAC (ipod/quicktime), DivX/Xvid/MP3, OGG Theora, etc. Note: FFmpeg is available in the standard Ubuntu repository but it’s very much hobbled and you’ll be disappointed when certain video editing apps and transcoding programs don’t work as expected.
$ sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
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About
Alexander Grundner is a San Francisco Peninsula based web publisher who spends most of his time tracking down news stories for eHomeUprade, attending technology events, or working on his next big project.
For fun he likes to stay active outdoors, take photographs, shoot video, hack together PHP/Python code, play with Linux, and test new technologies.
Thank you so much for the guide. It really made installing media codecs easier (and even works with hardy, which I used.) Thank you so much.
God bless you, sir.
That worked like a charm.