How to setup multimedia on CentOS-5

CentOS ships with basic sound support for audio content encoded with codecs for a variety of sound formats, including .wav and .ogg files. The alsa-utils and sox audio players are included for a TUI (CLI) environment; xmms is trivial to rebuild SRPMs. The popular full featured xmms player is omitted by the upstream, probably in light of the so-called Fraunhofer restrictions and non-free license requirements to address.

For those in jurisdictions not affected by such, the following procedures will describe how to setup multimedia support under CentOS 5. After completing the steps below, you should be able to play dvds on your computer. You'll also be able to view different media formats, for example Xvid, dvix, quicktime etc. You will also have mplayer integrated as a browser plugin which will allow you to view streaming video/audio content from within Firefox.

Some recommendations should be mentioned pertaining to the yum priorities plug-in. This will prevent accidentally overwriting packages from the base repositories. Also note the following needs to be performed as root user in a command line or terminal.

Please consider following the wiki document to assist in setting up the priorities plug-in, due to the fact that we are adding some third party repositories, described in the Priorities article.

Step 1: Add RPMforge repository access for your CentOS system. (Required for the majority of multimedia packages.)

You can read the installation instructions at Installing RPMForge.

Step 2: Install the multimedia applications.

The following steps will use yum to install all the packages needed to have full multimedia support. Note there will be a lot of dependencies.

yum install compat-libstdc++-33 libdvdcss libdvdread libdvdplay libdvdnav lsdvd libquicktime
yum install flash-plugin mplayerplug-in mplayer mplayer-gui gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly

Step 3: Install the w32Codecs. (Required for xvid and other proprietary formats.)

wget www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/mplayer-codecs-20061022-1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh mplayer-codecs-20061022-1.i386.rpm
wget www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/mplayer-codecs-extra-20061022-1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh mplayer-codecs-extra-20061022-1.i386.rpm

You should now have full multimedia and video support for most popular formats.