How to play .WMV files in Fedora?

[skyxn3t]

Originally Posted by marko

VirtualBox offers some access to accelerated graphics too

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#id464243

Did not know that, I'll install Virtual Box right now. Thank You.

In the meantime if anyone knows a solution/workaround to playing .wmv files in linux players then any help would be appreciated.

[bonedome]

Hmmm I seem to remember someone having a similar problem recently.
Namely

Requested video codec family [wmsdmod] (vfm=dmo) not available.
Enable it at compilation.

that codec is available here http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/
Only the answer may be a somewhat long winded one, you'll have to build mplayer yourself with those codecs compiled in, I just downloaded the latest mplayer (paste this into a terminal)

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

and ran ./configure with those codecs and it compiles ok, unfortunately I don't have a wmsdmod codec vid to try it on, so might end up being a waste of time anyway, so I could build it and post it for you (don't hold your breath), you could post a link to the vid or I'll let you know what you need to build it yourself

[skyxn3t]

Which codec should I download form here?
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/

[marko]

I just usually do all the stuff in this section of the mjmwired post about Mp3 and media players. The part of interest here is the "binary codecs" part.

Originally Posted by skyxn3t

Which codec should I download form here?
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/

You'd want -- >> all-20100303.tar.bz2

Actually it's not a codec as in a single one, this tar.bz2 file has dozens and dozens in it.

You can just follow the instructions here which are good.:

http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mj...l#binarycodecs

[skyxn3t]

@marko
I downloaded: all-20100303.tar.bz2

Then I did the steps posted in that website:
[mirandam@charon Download]$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/codecs
[mirandam@charon Download]$ sudo tar -jxvf all-20100303.tar.bz2 --strip-components 1 -C /usr/lib/codecs/

Is that all? Because if it is then Mplayer is still not playing .wmv files.

[bonedome]

Hello
I rebuilt mplayer today, this time with those codecs in /usr/local/lib/codecs, to see if there was any difference in the configure.log, but couldn't see anything.
could you post the output of

mplayer -vc help

about a third of the way down I have

wmsdmod     dmo       working   Windows Media Screen Codec 2  [wmsdmod.dll]

whether it works or not is another matter
I also saw (somewhere) adding xine-libs was a fix, worth a shot I s'pose

[skyxn3t]

Originally Posted by bonedome

Hello
I rebuilt mplayer today, this time with those codecs in /usr/local/lib/codecs, to see if there was any difference in the configure.log, but couldn't see anything.
...
I also saw (somewhere) adding xine-libs was a fix, worth a shot I s'pose

Hey,
Installing xine-libs didn't work.
Since you have already gone though the trouble of experimenting with mplayer and codecs, if it's not much trouble can you download the following .wmv file and see if what you did worked?
http://hotfile.com/dl/82165944/4bac4...Intro.wmv.html
If you don't have time then that's ok I'll just stay with VirtualBox until a solution comes along, if ever.

[marko]

Originally Posted by skyxn3t

@marko
I downloaded: all-20100303.tar.bz2

Then I did the steps posted in that website:
[mirandam@charon Download]$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/codecs
[mirandam@charon Download]$ sudo tar -jxvf all-20100303.tar.bz2 --strip-components 1 -C /usr/lib/codecs/

Is that all? Because if it is then Mplayer is still not playing .wmv files.

I just do all the MP3 and media player steps in the mjmwired page, install all the gstreamer packages and so on. But I don't have occasion to ever play wmv file, I just use mpeg, ogg, wavs and flacs

[skyxn3t]

Originally Posted by marko

I just do all the MP3 and media player steps in the mjmwired page, install all the gstreamer packages and so on. But I don't have occasion to ever play wmv file, I just use mpeg, ogg, wavs and flacs

Google searching I found that there are over 1000 different Forum threads of users asking this same question "How the hell do you play .wmv files on Linux?". I probably visited 100 of these threads and found no solution, so this might never get solved, I Give Up. At this point using VirtualBox is the only solution. Thanks for all the help anyway. : )

[marko]

Originally Posted by skyxn3t

Google searching I found that there are over 1000 different Forum threads of users asking this same question "How the hell do you play .wmv files on Linux?". I probably visited 100 of these threads and found no solution, so this might never get solved, I Give Up. At this point using VirtualBox is the only solution. Thanks for all the help anyway. : )

I just played the sample wmv file from here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316992

In Fedora 14 in Firefox and it worked fine. So it does work.

Update: I also played these video/audio wmv files from
http://www.peavynet.com/videodemo.htm both in Firefox and in vlc

[skyxn3t]

Originally Posted by marko

I just played the sample wmv file from here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316992

In Fedora 14 in Firefox and it worked fine. So it does work.

Yes that one plays fine with me too,
Can you play this one?
http://hotfile.com/dl/82165944/4bac4...Intro.wmv.html

[marko]

Yes that one plays fine with me too,
Can you play this one?
http://hotfile.com/dl/82165944/4bac4...Intro.wmv.html

No, in that case I get:

No suitable decoder module:
VLC does not support the audio or video format "MSS2". Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.

Hmm, must be some kind of sub-version of wmv, some wmv's will play in Linux but that one doesn't

See also:
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=83588

VLC in windows can't even play those according to that post

[kurtdriver]

I watched this in Firefox, downloaded it and then played it in Gnome-mplayer, Totem, VLC, and Banshee, so they play quite well in Fedora 13 on 64 bit chips. I'd suggest that rather than try Virtualbox you should work on whatever is the problem with your Fedora OS. Do you have the "ALL" codecs package from Mplayer?

[skyxn3t]

Originally Posted by kurtdriver

I watched this in Firefox, downloaded it and then played it in Gnome-mplayer, Totem, VLC, and Banshee, so they play quite well in Fedora 13 on 64 bit chips. I'd suggest that rather than try Virtualbox you should work on whatever is the problem with your Fedora OS. Do you have the "ALL" codecs package from Mplayer?

youtube videos get automatically converted to .flv once they are uploaded, the title is the file name of the original file, so what you played is an .flv file in flash
and I have all the codecs installed, marko has the same problem playing that wmv file I posted above.

---------- Post added at 09:33 PM GMT ---------- Previous post was at 09:32 PM GMT ----------

Originally Posted by marko

No, in that case I get:



Hmm, must be some kind of sub-version of wmv, some wmv's will play in Linux but that one doesn't

See also:
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=83588

VLC in windows can't even play those according to that post

Play that file in Totem or Mplayer and you will get only audio with no video. But the file plays fine with WIndows Media Player. Most wmv files are like that, only a few like the one in the M$ page play fine, which is the main problem and that is why there are thousands of threads of linux users trying to play wmv files on linux.

[bonedome]

Hello
the video link you posted http://hotfile.com/dl/82165944/4bac4...Intro.wmv.html does work for me, here is the printout

Playing /home/scooby/videos/00_LPI Series Intro.wmv.
ASF file format detected.
[asfheader] Audio stream found, -aid 1
[asfheader] Video stream found, -vid 2
VIDEO:  [MSS2]  640x480  24bpp  1000.000 fps    6.4 kbps ( 0.8 kbyte/s)
Clip info:
 title: CBT Nuggets Training Videos
 author: CBT Nuggets, Inc.
 copyright: 1999-2004, CBT Nuggets, Inc.
 comments: IT Certification Training Videos - www.cbtnuggets.com
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [dmo] DMO video codecs
DMO dll supports VO Optimizations 0 1
DMO dll might use previous sample when requested
Decoder supports the following formats: RGB8 RGB555 RGB565 RGB24 RGB32 
Movie-Aspect is undefined - no prescaling applied.
VO: [x11] 640x480 => 640x480 BGRA  [zoom]
[swscaler @ 0x93958c0] using unscaled bgra -> bgra special converter
Selected video codec: [wmsdmod] vfm: dmo (Windows Media Screen Codec 2)
==========================================================================
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders
AUDIO: 22050 Hz, 1 ch, floatle, 20.0 kbit/2.83% (ratio: 2500->88200)
Selected audio codec: [ffwmavoice] afm: ffmpeg (WMA Voice audio (FFmpeg))
==========================================================================

The readme in the codecs package is not very clear, you have got to compile mplayer from source yourself after installing the codecs pack.
Here's what I did, downloaded the latest mplayer source, downloaded the codecs package and installed in /usr/local/lib/codecs, opened a terminal inside mplayer directory, did ./configure, make, make install and ldconfig.
All in takes about 10-15 minutes depending on your system
Of course if you've never built software from source you'll need a lot of development packages, I can post a list if you're interested.
mplayer source code is very clever it detects all the devel packages for you so you don't have to specify them like you do with ffmpeg for example