IT Gang - A place for tips and tricks

I have downloaded some very old and nice Romanian songs played by Compact, my wife's favourite band. After I have unzipped the archive, I double clicked on it and then Totem Movie player started. But then I got an error because I was missing some codecs...

It was not the first time I got an error from Totem player, but this time I was really getting mad! Instead, as the famous saying says ("Don't get mad, get even!") I googled for "winamp for linux". I found a version 3 alpha that did not look very nice, nor stable, and then I found this on the winamp support forum:

Some people reported that Winamp can run under Linux using Wine (with limited features, eg. only classic skins). No guarantees though, Winamp is a Windows program.

(source)

Ok, so no linux version for Winamp... Not good, but I can live without it. But what player to use?

And so I found amarok which looked nice. But, most important, they had instructions on how to get the needed codecs to play mp3!

To enable MP3 support, the rpmfusion repository should be added to Yum. Click here to find out how to do that.

Once rpmfusion is enabled, the easiest way to enable all the freeworld/nonfree codec support, is to:

yum update @sound-and-video

This will enable mp3 support for Totem player also. But you can still go ahead and download amarok if you need a more robust mp3 player. I for one am using amarok.

PS: This command will also update all video codecs for Totem player. This means that from now on you can also play movies that were not able to play before (this includes compressed AVI, WMV format and more!)