This is a screencast about watching videos in Ubuntu,
by the screencast team.
The version I am using is 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon,
but this information is going to apply pretty much for everything.
Watching videos on Ubuntu is pretty easy,
but because videos are delivered to computers as encoded and compressed video files,
there are some extra little plugins or codecs specifically that you'll need to install
to watch certain video items.
Now Ubuntu comes with a couple of different programs
that'll help you watch your videos and listen to your songs.
Maybe the most popular way of watching videos is with a DVD.
So I'm going to pop in a DVD here
and it'll open up automatically in the default movie player,
which is called Totem.
But as you'll see, because DVDs use a special MPEG 2 codec,
which doesn't belong to Ubuntu, the code actually belongs to someone else,
we'll need to download a codec plugin
that will interpret the MPEG 2 encoding that DVDs use.
And Ubuntu makes this very easy.
It tells you that you need a codec
and invites you to search for that codec online.
And if we do that it will takes us right to the package manager
and help us install that.
So here it's searching for that
and there it's found a GStreamer plugin.
And GStreamer you'll come across a couple of times,
it's a really great plugin that some independent programmers have written
that will help us, will help the Linux machine decode the encoding
that the videos have been subject to.
So it's warning you here that it's a restricted software package,
meaning that it doesn't belong to Ubuntu, it doesn't belong to you.
It's closed source, if there ever needs to be any kind of special support for it
it's not something you or Ubuntu or anyone else can do.
It's just strictly it belongs to someone else,
they have not released the code to the open source community.
So if you're okay with that you can click Ok and install it on your machine.
It's searching for everything, it's installing and making sure that it's in the right place.
Say Ok and pretty much immediately the movie player kicks right back in
and starts playing the video.
And the Totem movie player is a pretty simple application to grasp.
It sits there and plays the video in that window,
you can also switch to full screen,
which I do typically if I'm just watching a movie.
So there's the full screen view.
If you move the mouse you get your controls at the bottom to pause or fast forward,
you can leave the full screen, things like that.
And you can play also, you can also play local files, you don't have to just play a DVD.
Like if you had something saved on your hard drive and you want to see that, you can.
If there's any kind of correction, like de-interlacing to get rid of jagged edges,
or aspect ratio correction
or if you need to attach a subtitle file to something,
you can do that.
So that's a really good little program to use.
You can open up files from pretty much anywhere,
from a DVD, CD-ROM or whatever.
So I'm going to quit out of that, I'm going to eject this DVD,
because I'm pretty much finished with that now I've got the codec installed.
The other popular place to see videos are online.
So if we launch Firefox, the default web browser,
we can go to some place with videos on it
and kind of get a feel for all of the different formats of video
that you are going to encounter online.
A great place for that, for open source, open culture videos is archive.org
So here is a really funny public domain movie that they've posted.
And as you can see on the left
there's just a lot of different formats of video
that are used online to deliver content to people.
And that kind of...
that kind of causes some problems with watching video,
because typically whether you're on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux,
you have to coordinate whether you've got the right codec in your system,
versus what is being delivered to your desktop.
So I'm searching right now for a video with an open source codec in it,
which happens to be one of our very own Ubuntu screencasts.
And here's Ogg Vorbis.
Now Ogg, where you see Ogg, that's and open source codec
that'll play fine on any Linux machine, no problem,
because it's an open, free codec, it doesn't belong to anyone,
it belongs to the open source community.
You can watch it, there's no-one going to be hiding in the background,
trying to charge you for it.
So that's if you can get Ogg, go for Ogg,
that's a good one and I use it a lot for my own,
for the videos that I am storing on my computer.
But otherwise, there's other codecs that you're probably going to encounter
and you're probably going to need to install the decoder for it.
So here's an MPEG 4 trying to play in my browser
and obviously it's not working.
I know it's not working because it's a black screen.
To get that codec the easiest way is to just right-click on the screen where the video should be
and select open in movie player,
because the movie player will prompt you to find the suitable codec.
So it's just like when we were trying to do it for the DVD.
So I'll tell it to go ahead and search for the codec.
It shows two different ones.
One concentrates on the MPEG 4 or MPEG
and another one concentrates more on the audio like AAC
(well) and XVID, so that's video as well.
So I'm going to go ahead and install both.
Click install
and it will do that for me.
and after this installs I'll need to close my web browser and re-launch it,
more than likely, just so it will pick up the newly installed plugin.
Sometimes the plugins are specific to the web browser,
so you want to make sure that you're installing the one that corresponds with your browser.
So if you're on KDE or Kubuntu,
you might want to make sure that you're getting the plugin for Konqueror,
if you're not using Firefox or Mozilla.
So now I'm going to reopen this video in Firefox
to see if it works, yeah, so it starts playing.
And as you can see it's really low quality because this was a really small file.
So they compressed it a lot and I'm trying to play it as a very large picture.
So whenever that happens you just need to shrink your browser down a little bit,
because it wasn't meant to be this size.
For video that going to look sharper at a very large size,
you're going to what to click on whatever version of that video
that happens to be a much larger file size.
So it will take longer to download, but it will be much clearer at a full screen.
But for something like this I think playing it in a small, little window is fine.
It looks nice and Sharp and gets the point across.
Now this, the in-browser view,
which you'll see on youtube, you'll see here on archive.org.
you'll see a lot of places, it requires the flash player.
So if you click on that, it directs me to the flash website.
and they just released the latest flash player for Linux.
specifically for the x86 platform,
pretty much all the computers, all the popular Intel computers.
And you could download it from there, but it's been added already to the Ubuntu repository.
So it's a lot easier to just do it through your package manager.
So I'm opening up Synaptic and I'm going to do a search for flash
and somewhere here there's a flash plugin.
There's also a plugin called Gnash,
which you could also try out.
It's an open source version of the flash player.
And on some system I've had good luck with that,
on some systems I've not had such great luck with it.
So I'm going to go for the flash,
again it's telling you that this is a non-free plugin,
so it's not going to be something that can really be supported by Ubuntu as such.
It's something that Adobe owns
and only they can access that code, so it's not very open,
it's definitely not community property.
But if you're okay with that you can have it install,
Then it'll download it and install it
I think for this one we'll probably definitely have to relaunch the browser.
And there it's applied the change, we'll say Ok.
I'm going to quit out of the package manager, Synaptic
and I'm going to quit out of Firefox.
And now I'll just quickly re-launch Firefox.
Grab that again, click on this and there it is, there's the flash player.
Now if you want to see video fullscreen, at full quality, that kind of thing,
especially off of archive.org or the Ubuntu screencast site,
Things like that where you have the option of downloading it.
right here on the left you can see that there are
a lot of different formats available for direct download.
So you could actually download those straight to your desktop.
You just right-click on it, save the link as.
you can name it and save it to your desktop and then watch it any time you want,
And depending on how big the video file is,
it might be a really nice big, huge download in really great quality.
So you could do that.
Now again your best bet for compatibility would be to grab the Ogg files where possible.
And certainly on the Ubuntu screencasts, you've got Ogg available to you.
Save that link as, I'll just put it on my desktop.
Say Ok and there it's going to start downloading.
And you can see that that's a fairly large file,
so if I play that at a really
trying to fill up half my screen, it's not really going to suffer any quality loss.
it'll be a nice clear video.
Much better than that small, little postage stamp size
and I can play that right in my movie player, in Totem.
And there are also other great video players out there for Linux.
Some of which really help playing,
because there are so many codecs out there,
you never know what you're going to need.
One of the great little multipurpose players is called VLC,
just do a search for that in Synaptic Package Manager.
It will come up as a package that you can install.
And this is an open source program,
mark this for installation.
And VLC will play, well really it plays practically everything I've ever thrown at it.
Certainly it does all the MPEGs, it does Quicktime, it does Windows Media,
lots and lots of different formats without really bothering you about installing
too many codecs and it will play subtitle files as well
along with that video, so it's a really nice little versatile program.
That also actually you can set it up to be a streaming server,
a streaming video server, so if you ever want to do that.
Another really cool program is called Miro.
which is at getmiro.com or getdemocracy.com
and this a cool little application that we can't really go into too much here.
because it's kind of a specialized program.
But it basically delivers a lot of video content,
it's sort of an aggregator of video content.
So it will play youtube, it'll play different podcasts
and there are directions on how to install it on their website
specifically dealing with Ubuntu's install.
So it's kind of cool to check out if you want to watch a lot of IPTV
and podcasts and things like that.
You should check that out, it gives you detailed instructions
and you have to add a repository, so I don't want to go into that right now.
There's another screencast about how to add repositories to the package manager,
and that's what this would involve.
But if you go to getmiro.com, they give you really good instructions on how to install.
So it's a nice little application
and it's something that actually Ubuntu screencasts streams out to as well.
So you can get all the latest screencasts right there in your Miro player.
This has been watching videos on Ubuntu.
Hopefully it's helped you understand a little bit more about encoded videos,
compressed videos, how to watch them smoothly.
For more screencasts you can stop by screencasts.ubuntu.com
And you can request a topic for us to cover.
And certainly share them with everyone you know,
whether they're Linux users or not.
They're really great educational videos.
And very unique to the Linux and Ubuntu community.
So check them out and have fun.