How to Install MPlayer and MEncoder on Fedora

Fedora does not include MPlayer or MEncoder for some reasons in its official repositories. But RPMfusion does it for us. Let’s install mplayer and mencoder and learn some tricks to play rmvb files.

1. Add RPMfusion repository:

Enable RPM Fusion repositories

2. Install MPlayer and MEncoder

# dnf install mplayer mencoder

3. Get codecs

Most of the time, you will do not need to manually download codecs. If you find some files that can not be played by mplayer, you may try to download some codecs.

Dowload all-yyyymmdd.tar.bz2 from http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs.

Download a codecs such as all-20100303.tar.bz2. Then you can extract the package and store the files to a location that mplayer/mencoder will search for.

# tar xf all-20100303.tar.bz2
# mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/codecs/
# mv all-20100303/* /usr/local/lib/codecs/

4. Enjoy it!

5. Play rmvb files

If there is no video or mplayer crashes when playing .rmvb files, you need to install libstdc++ libraries:

# yum install libstdc++ compat-libstdc++-33 compat-libstdc++-296

Then try using mplay to play rmvb files again. It should work now.

More usage of mplayer and mencoder, please check the mplayer/mencoder manual page.

For more tips on using mplayer/mencoder, please check the Posts tagged mplayer.