Certain kinds of files have legal restrictions on playback and thus you must enable support for these formats after installation. This page will walk you through the most popular types of files.

Disclaimer and Legal Notice

Some of the packages listed here may be illegal in your country. Use at your own risk.

If at all possible, please use FreeFormats as they are supported by Ubuntu.

Before You Start

Nearly all the applications and packages mentioned on this page are found in the universe and multiverse repositories. See AddingRepositoriesHowto for instructions on enabling the universe and multiverse repositories.

Some additional packages are found in repositories not controlled Ubuntu. Please do not file bugs about these specific packages.

Additionally, you must have administration privileges to install packages. RootSudo explains how Ubuntu provides the necessary privileges.

Media Players

Media Players provided by Ubuntu

Ubuntu supports Totem (a movie player) and Rhythmbox (a music player); Kubuntu includes Kaffeine and Amarok. These applications play free formats (ogg vorbis, ogg theora, and the like) 'out of the box'. However, they can also play most non-free media formats if you install some additional packages, see below.

Other Movie Players

MultimediaApplications describes the most popular media players provided in Ubuntu, including the above.

Other popular movie players include ["VLC"], [:MplayerInstallHowto:mplayer], ["Xine-ui"] and ["Totem-xine"] (a more capable version of totem). vlc plays most non-free movie formats natively. Playing non-free movies in mplayer, xine-ui and totem-xine requires a package that is not available from the Ubuntu repositories, the w32codecs. (Unfortunately, the w32codecs are generally not useable on the PPC or AMD64 versions of Ubuntu.)

Non-Free Media

MP3s

To play MP3s, if you live in a country where it is legal to play MP3s without a license, [:AddingRepositoriesHowto: enable the universe and multiverse repositories] and install the gstreamer0.8-mad package.

If you want to know how to make MP3s from your cds ("ripping" to MP3), see the page CDRipping.

Other Non-Free Formats

If you live in a country where it is legal to play MP3s and other non-free media formats without a license, [:AddingRepositoriesHowto: enable the universe and multiverse repositories], and install the support packages by typing in a terminal: {{{ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-plugins gstreamer0.8-plugins-multiverse gstreamer0.8-ffmpeg }}}

Other Formats

"The Codecs" support playing MPEG-1, -2 & -4, DivX, Quicktime, Real Media 8 & 9, Windows Media Video 9 and many other formats.

If you live in a country where it is legal to use the codecs, use your web browser to download the file [http://www.giannaros.org/public/breezydebs/w32codecs_20050412-0.0_i386.deb] to your Desktop, and, in a terminal, type:

cd ~/Desktop
sudo dpkg -i w32codecs_20050412-0.0_i386.deb

Playing Streaming Video from the Internet

There are a variety of applications that can play streaming video. One of the more popular is mozilla-mplayer, which is available in the multiverse repository. You should install the w32codecs (see above), [:AddingRepositoriesHowto: enable the multiverse repository] and, in a terminal, type:

sudo apt-get install mozilla-mplayer

Playing DVD's

Most commercial DVDs are encrypted with CSS (the Content Scrambling System). The movie players provided in Ubuntu are capable of reading DVDs that are not encrypted. If it is legal for you to circumvent CSS, then you can enable reading encrypted DVDs in vlc, mplayer, xine and totem-xine by installing libdvdcss2. Type in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread3
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh

DVD Issues

DVD Lockup

If your movie player locks up when attempting to access a DVD, you will need to place a DVD movie in your DVD drive, then do the following:

sudo apt-get install regionset
regionset

Alternatively, you can do this without a DVD in your drive if you know your region number. Be warned the software claims you can only change regions 4 times, so that the effects of this procedure are irreversible and may render your drive permanently unable to read DVDs encoded for a particular region.

Jerky Playback

If DVD playback is jerky or you notice optical data transfer (i.e burning a CD/DVD) is slower than it should be, then you need to enable DMA transfer for that drive. See the ["DMA"] page for details.

RealPlayer

To install RealPlayer 10, use your browser to download the package [ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/pool/main/r/realplay/realplayer_10.0.6-0.0_i386.deb realplayer_10.0.6-0.0_i386.deb] to your Desktop, and install it (along with a support package needed by RealPlayer) by typing in a terminal:

cd ~/Desktop
sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
sudo dpkg -i realplayer_10.0.6-0.0_i386.deb

See RealplayerInstallationMethods for other ways to install RealPlayer.

Most of Real's non-free media formats can also be played by mplayer, xine, and totem-xine when the w32codecs are installed.

Smil

Use the File Manager to navigate to a folder containing a Smil file. Click the file with the right mouse button, select Properties, and then the tab Open With. Click the radio button next to RealPlayer 10, and close the dialog window.

RealMedia

If you want RealPlayer to be the default application to open RealMedia files, use the File Manager to navigate to a folder containing a RealMedia file. Click the file with the right mouse button, select Properties, and then the tab Open With. Click the radio button next to RealPlayer 10, and close the dialog window.

Macromedia Flash

Macromedia's Flash Player is only available for i386 based machines, and Shock Wave is not available at all. There are projects that are attempting to provide free support for Flash, and currently they are the only way to get Flash support for the PPC and AMD64 distributions of Ubuntu.

Flash can be problematic, so if you have problems (and solutions), read Flash Issues below.

Flash for i386

To add Flash Player support for konqueror, mozilla, firefox, epiphany and other browsers, [:AddingRepositoriesHowto:enable the multiverse repository] and, in a terminal, type:

for Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary)

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

for Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy)

sudo apt-get install flashplayer-mozilla

See FlashPlayerInstallationMethods for other ways to enable Flash.

Flash for AMD64 and PPC

"For those of us with 64-bit processors (or Mac) there is no non-free flash implementation available because the manufacturer does not support them. However, there are two free implementations. One is gplflash and the other is swfdec. There is also gplflash2 in development that aims to be the proper free, open source replacement for all the platforms. While you can install them using apt-get, they tend not to work very well and are unstable, so that option is not great. Better to install one of them (I recommend gplflash) manually." If you are determined, another option is to install a i386 ubuntu in a DebootstrapChroot and launch your browser with flash plugin from there.

gplflash from Ubuntu

To install gplflash, [:AddingRepositoriesHowto:enable the universe repository] and, in a terminal, type:

sudo apt-get install libflash-mozplugin

compiling gplflash

Since the gplflash in Ubuntu can be unstable, a better method is to compile it from source. To do this, first install some needed support packages by typing:

sudo apt-get install libx11-dev xlibs-dev libmad0-dev libjpeg-dev checkinstall

Then, get the gplflash source and compile and install it by typing :

wget -c http://mirror.optusnet.com.au/sourceforge/g/gp/gplflash/gplflash-0.4.13.tar.bz2
tar xvjf gplflash-0.4.13.tar.bz2
cd gplflash-0.4.13
./configure --with-plugin-dir=/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
make
sudo checkinstall

When you restart your web browser you should have a working, stable flash plugin.

Flash Issues

Sound

Symptoms

* Flash videos stop playing after 1 second.

* Firefox freezes when going to another page ater having tried to view a flash video.

* The firefox process not correctly ending after having tried to view a flash video.

Possible Fixes

After Flash is installed, if the sound is not working properly, or you experience one of the above symptoms, try one of the following solutions:

Open:

gedit ~/.mozilla/firefox/rc

Add the line:

FIREFOX_DSP="none"

As an alternative solution, if the above doesn't solve the problem: Type the following in a terminal:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libesd.so.0 /usr/lib/libesd.so.1

Video

Possible Video Fixes

If you use an Intel 855GM video card, ensure you set the X server colour depth to 24 bits, otherwise you will probably experience Firefox crashes.

You may need to install the gsfonts-x11 package for flash to properly display fonts.

AAC and iTunes Music Store

AAC decoding

The default audio format used by Apple's iTunes and iPod is AAC. This is a variant of the MPEG standard, and as such has patent issues. However, you can listen to AAC files in rhythmbox or amarok by installing gstreamer0.8-faad. You will need this for listening to any AAC file, including those bought from the iTunes Music Store (see below for more info on using the music store on Linux). Warning: songs purchased from the iTunes music store (.m4p) are encrypted and will not just play using gstreamer0.8-faad. You will need to decrypt them first.

AAC encoding:

FAAC can be used to encode AACs, although this is somewhat experimental compared to MP3 encoding at this point. For encoding programs which use gstreamer, there is a gstreamer plugin called gstreamer0.8-faac. However, this currently is problematic, and does not produce usable AAC files, though this may change in the future.

For other programs, you may be able to utilize FAAC directly to encode to AACs - just install the "faac" package. You can make iPod-compatible AACs this way, but this requires some additional configuration in your CD ripping utility.

iTunes Music Store

Apple's iTunes Music Store sells music online with a large selection of artists. Songs are in 128K AAC format, and cost varies by country. Apple only has Mac and Windows clients, but it also can be used on Linux. There are two different methods by which this can be done.

First of all, you can use CodeWeavers CrossOver Office (available at http://www.codeweavers.com) to install the Windows version of iTunes on Ubuntu. This will allow you to buy iTunes songs on Linux and listen to them. However, the main caveats of this approach are that 1) it costs money 2) it is not a fully Linux-native solution.

As an alternative to using CrossOver, there is a new, Free program called PyMusique which allows basic usage of the iTunes Music Store on Linux. This works better than using iTunes on CrossOver, but PyMusique has fewer features than the official iTunes client at this point and may be in violation of the iTunes Music Store terms of service. To use this on Ubuntu, first install gstreamer0.8-faad and libmcrypt4. Then, go to http://fuware.nanocrew.net/pymusique/ or a mirror (google "pymusique 0.4" for mirrors) and download the pymusique, python2.4-mcrypt, python2.4-vlc, and python2.4-mp4ff packages. Finally, install all the packages you downloaded from the above website. You can now launch PyMusique from the Applications-Internet menu, and purchase songs (although you may have to restart your system for this to work).

PyMusique has been superceded by SharpMusique, available from http://www.nanocrew.net/software/sharpmusique/. It is available as a .deb for Breezy Badger and allows you to preview songs, signup for an account, buy songs and albums, redownload songs that you bought, and more.

Getting Java

For Ubuntu 5.10 (breezy), the easiest method is to use the Blackdown Java 1.4 installer from Multiverse. To install Java with the installer, just do:

sudo apt-get install j2re1.4

Ubuntu PPC, please see: ["JavaPPC"]. Ubuntu AMD64, please see: ["JavaAMD64"].

Sun Java

The alternative method which will get you the latest version from Sun and also works better for most applications is to install the Sun version of Java. Sun's implementation of Java and Java plugin for browsers is also non-free. Free Java is in active development and will be the preferred choice in the future also as a browser plugin (currently it is used in some programs like OpenOffice.org). Meanwhile, if you require Java support you have to install Sun's Java, assuming they happen to support your platform.

Go to http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp and click on “Download JRE 5.0 Update 6”. Ensure you do not choose the link with the NetBeans bundle or "J2EE 1.4".

You must first accept the licence, then click on “Linux self-extracting file” (jre-1_5_0_06-linux-i586.bin). Save this file to your hard drive.

Make the downloaded file executable. At the command line, change to the directory where you downloaded the file, and type

chmod +x jre-1_5_0_06-linux-i586.bin

Install the java-package and java-common, as well as fakeroot (which allows a non-root user to create the package derived from Sun's bin file):

sudo apt-get install fakeroot java-package java-common

If you get an error when installing java-package, you need to enable the multiverse repository (see ["AddingRepositoriesHowto"]).

To install the JRE, type the lines below:

fakeroot make-jpkg jre-1_5_0_06-linux-i586.bin
sudo dpkg -i sun-j2re1.5_1.5.0+update06_i386.deb

If you get an error similar to this:

Loading plugins: blackdown-j2re.sh blackdown-j2sdk.sh common.sh ibm-j2re.sh ibm-j2sdk.sh j2re.sh j2sdk.sh j2se.sh sun-j2re.sh sun-j2sdk.sh

No matching plugin was found.

Try

DEB_BUILD_GNU_TYPE=i386-linux fakeroot make-jpkg jre-1_5_0_03-linux-i586.bin

or similar command if you are not using i386 architecture.

make-jpkg translates Sun's bin file into a debian package. Then dpkg installs that package.

Sun Java SDK (Software Development Kit)

The same procedure can also be used to install Sun's Java SDK instead of just the runtime environment (JRE). Just choose "Download JDK 5.0 Update 6" when downloading the package from Sun, and replace the file name with jdk-1_5_0_06-linux-i586.bin

Selecting the default Java version

In Breezy, if you want to use Sun Java instead of the open source GIJ you need to set it as default. Run:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

and select your preference from the list.

Java on Mozilla Firefox

Installing Java without following the previous steps does not alert Firefox to its presence. If you simply executed the .bin file you downloaded, you will need to tell Firefox or Mozilla where to find the plugin library:

If you do not have a .mozilla/plugins directory in your home directory, create one.

mkdir -p /home/username/.mozilla/plugins

Then

cd /home/username/.mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/j2re1.5-sun/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so libjavaplugin_oji.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/j2re1.5-sun/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/

You can skip these steps if you used the make-jpkg command.

If you have downloaded more than one, you need to modify the command to be more specific.

Java on amd64 computers

Unfortunately, Sun's Java for 64-bit PC's does't work very well yet, but the Blackdown version of Java works and is available in the Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) multiverse repository.

sudo apt-get install j2re1.4 j2re1.4-mozilla-plugin

Afterwards restart Firefox and you should have a working Java plugin.