MPlayer

As you can see in my installation notes, I started out using Totem Player. But much to my surprise, Totem Player can't play *.wmv videos. If you Google for 'Totem wmv' you'll see from others experiences that it is a real hassle to get Totem Player to play Quicktime or Windows Media formats. And in every forum they will suggest installing MPlayer instead.

I really don't understand why Totem Player is installed by default in Fedora, when things are so much easier with MPlayer.

Install MPlayer by selecting Applications -> Add/Remove Software. Choose 'List' and scroll down to applications beginning with 'm', if you can't find it.

When MPlayer is installed, fetch the essential codecs from mplayerhq.hu. At the time of writing, the file to download was named 'essential-20060611.tar.bz2'. Just download it to any location and then...

gtar xjvf essential-20060611.tar.bz2
mkdir /usr/local/lib/win32
mv essential-20060611/* /usr/local/lib/win32

You can now play any video by opening a terminal and feed mplayer with the address. Here is an example of playing a *.wmv file:

mplayer mms://media.example.com/path/to/video.wmv

Enjoy! :-)