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Gstreamer Support
Many Gnome multimedia applications like Totem use Gstreamer for multimedia support. To use features such as DVD Video and MP3, you have to install Gstreamer plug-ins. These are available from Livna. Look for packages beginning with gtreamer-plugins. There are ones for video, dvd, audio, and mp3. You can download and install these separately with your browser, or just use the YUM command, yum install gstreamer-plugins*. The * at the end will match on all the plug-ins. Your architecture (i586, i686, or x86_64) will be detected automatically.

Figure 2 shows the packages selected for a 64-bit system. It will show what repositories are being used, in this case livna.

Mplayer
Mplayer is a very popular multimedia player. You can find out more about Mplayer at www.mplayerhq.hu. If this is your first multimedia package, numerous dependent packages will also be selected. To install just enter yum install mplayer

On Fedora Core 4, there's an additional problem with many players, including mplayer, with a incorrect default device name for the DVD-ROM or CD-ROM device like /dev/dvd. You'll have to configure mplayer to use /media/cdrom or /media/cdrecorder. Figure 4 shows the extensive number of dependent packages selected when installing Mplayer as one of your first multimedia applications.

xine
Perhaps the easiest player to use for music, video, and DVD playback, xine has a very easy to use interface. Both Xine and Mplayer use many of the same supporting packages, so you may see a much shorter list of dependencies for the one installed later. Use the command, yum install xine

As with mplayer, you'll have to change the device from /dev/dvd to /media/cdrom, using the advanced configuration level. Figure 5 shows the entire selection and install process.

Additional Support: FFMPEG
For additional multimedia codecs you may want to download ffmpeg, and for other multimedia players you may want libdvdnav and libdvdplay. All can be installed easily with yum. Use, yum install ffmpeg.

Divx6 isn't available on any of the repositories though XviD (xvidcore) is. For Divx6, you'll have to go to www.divx.com and download and install the Linux version manually. It doesn't require any supporting packages.

Videolan is another popular player requiring a list of supporting packages. You can install the videolan client with yum from Freshrpms. Use yum install videolan-client.

MP3 with LAME
LAME originally stood for Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder, but has long since been a full MP3 encoder whose software is available under the LPGL license. It's included with Videolan and FFmpeg and YUM will download it from Freshrpms in support of Mplayer or Xine. You can download it separately with, yum install lame.

Video Driver and NTFS Support: Livna
You can get Nvidia and ATI graphics drivers, as well as the NTFS kernel module from Livna. These you can download and install individually or with YUM. The graphic drivers use two packages, one for the supporting software and another for the kernel. You'll have to download the supporting software first. The kernel module is specific to the kernel you're using. At the rpm.livna.org site you'll find ATI and Nvidia modules listed for each kernel version. Note that the name of the ATI kernel module is fglrx. To find out your kernel version, you can use the command uname -r. The following are the ATI and Nvidia drivers packages:

nvidia-glx-1.0.8174-0.lvn.1.4.i386.rpm
kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.14-1.1653_FC4-1.0.8174-0.lvn.1.4.i686.rpm
ati-fglrx-8.20.8.1-0.lvn.2.4
kernel-module-fglrx-2.6.13-1.1532_FC4-8.18.6.1-0.lvn.1.4.i686.rpm

You can download and install the packages directly though for ATI you could use YUM instead on just the kernel module. To specify the correct kernel module, you can add $(uname -r) to the name. The driver software will also be selected as a dependency. Use yum kernel-module-fgrlx-$(uname -r). For Nvidia it's more complicated since there's also a legacy driver that's used for older cards. It's probably best to download and install the Nvidia packages individually with your Web browser.

On dual-boot systems that have a Windows XP or NT systems sharing the same computer, the NTFS package lets you read files on the NTFS file systems. To access NTFS systems you'd use the kernel-module-ntfs package. Be sure to select the one for your kernel version. The i686 version for the 2.6.14-1 kernel is shown here. There's also a smp version for dual-core and Hyper-threaded CPUs, as well as an i586 version for older CPUs. The 64-bit version is in the x86_64 directory. It's best to download and install directly from your Web browser. Use kernel-module-ntfs-2.6.14-1.1653_FC4-2.1.22-0.lvn.3.4.i686.rpm.

Conclusion
The Fedora Core distribution is becoming just a core set of applications intended to be supplemented by the extensive collection of software available from software repositories. Though Fedora Extras repositories hold a large collection of software, many of the driver and popular multimedia packages are to be found in the Livna and Freshrpms software repositories. Access to this software is integrated into Fedora using YUM.

References

• http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum Yellowdog Update, Modified software manager
• http://rpm.livna.org/fedora Livna Fedora software repository
• http://rpm.livna.org/configuration RPM Livna configuration information
• http://freshrpms.net Freshrpms Web site
• http://ayo.freshrpms.net Freshrpms repository listing
• http://ftp.reshrpms.net Freshrpms FTP site
• www.mplayerhq.hu Mplayer Web site
• http://xinehq.de Xine Web site
• www.videolan.org Videolan Web site
• www.mp3dev.org LAME MP3 project
• http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net FFmpeg project
• www.divx.com/linux Linux DivX code
• www.xvid.com XviD DivX codec

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