Fedora Multimedia Installation HOWTO

Eric Steven Raymond

Revision History
Revision 5.12006-03-25Revised by: esr
Simplified and corrected some FC5 instructions.
Revision 5.02006-03-21Revised by: esr
Update for Fedora Core 5. On the one hand, we can get almost everything from livna now, which simplifies life. On the other hand, Totem and Xine are both completely broken.
Revision 4.02005-10-09Revised by: esr
Update for Fedora Core 4. The fedora.us repositories have become Fedora Extras. Adobe Acrobat plugin no longer seems to be necessary, xpdf and evince must have gotten better.
Revision 3.02004-11-07Revised by: esr
Update for Fedora Core 3.
Revision 2.22004-09-07Revised by: esr
Corrections for 2.6.8 kernel and Mozilla 1.7.
Revision 2.12004-08-03Revised by: esr
RealPlayer 10 is out in open source. This changes some things.
Revision 2.02004-07-14Revised by: esr
Updated for FC2. Removed up2date methods, as FC2 update seems to be broken.
Revision 1.22004-02-03Revised by: esr
Typo fixes.
Revision 1.12004-01-31Revised by: esr
Dag Wieers's repository is yum-enabled, so drop apt-get out of the picture. Add mozilla-acroread installation. Add some attack-lawyer repellant.
Revision 1.02004-01-30Revised by: esr
Initial release.

How to get various proprietary and restricted multimedia Damned Things (AVI, Flash, Java, MP3, MPEG, QuickTime, RealMedia, Windows Media) working under Fedora Core using your normal package-management tools. Includes Firefox-plugin instructions. Now with coverage of both 32- and 64-bit Intel-architecture systems.

Unfortunately, the news in FC5 is almost all bad. Totem and Xine are both completely broken.


Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1. New versions of this document
2. Packages, Tools and Repositories
3. Security considerations and other risks
4. Macromedia Flash
5. gstreamer and ffmpeg support
6. MP3
7. Java
8. RealAudio and RealVideo
9. MPEG, QuickTime, AVI, and DVDs
10. Test pages for Web streaming
11. Related Resources
12. License and Copyright
13. Acknowledgements