Media Formats and Codecs in Ubuntu

Ubuntu by default supports free formats for audio and video files and it doesn’t (by default) support many popular audio and video formats. These formats are called Restricted Formats. It doesn’t mean that you can not play these formats in Ubuntu. Ubuntu Wiki has detailed information about enabling support for Restricted Formats. In this post I will only talk about how I worked around this issue.

VLC GTK+

VLC multimedia player is a crossplatform multimedia player from Video Lan. It plays MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4, DivX, MOV, WMV, QuickTime, mp3, Ogg/Vorbis files, DVDs, VCDs, and multimedia streams from various network sources. If you have universe and multiverse repositories enabled. You can download it from Applications > Add Applications > Sound and Video.

Real Player 10

Real Player is a streaming sound and video player from RealNetworks. RealNetworks does not allow redistribution of their software. Therefore, this package requires the user to fetch the real player archive separately from their web site. Here is how I installed Real Player:

Download RealPlayer for Linux (.deb package) to your Desktop.

 sudo dpkg -i RealPlayer11GOLD.deb

If the installation gives an error then you might need to install libstdc++5 or libstdc++6 package first.

Thats all I have on my computer to enjoy music and videos in non-free formats.