Install the Full Proprietary Codecs Pack in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal!

To be honest, Ubuntu is not for everyone. It's has a way of its own while doing "things" but from a "user-friendly" point of view, it is one of the most easiest to use nonetheless!.

Also when comparing with Fedora Core, etc... installing a full proprietary codecs in Ubuntu is one of the easiest things to do too.

So after installing the Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, as usual you must've found out that, the Totem player Front-end simply can't play some multimedia files (well, most of the known codecs).

In that case, you can simply open your Terminal and enter the below command which will install a full codec pack that'll let you play a lot of proprietary codecs such as mp3, avi, mpeg1/2 (DVDs) and many more.

Here's the command.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

But this codec pack won't allow you to play original DVD movies that are encrypted by default. So again use the below commands to enable "that one" as well :P. 

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/natty.list –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring
sudo apt-get update 

sudo -s
    apt-get install libdvdcss2
    cd /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/
    ./install-css.sh

That's it, enjoy!. 

Offline Multimedia Codec Pack For Ubuntu 10.10

Linux will always struggle to give users "what they want", although this has nothing to do with they being incapable of doing so, yet they choose not to, it seems (which is understandable actually). But, no matter what they choose for us, we'll always have the ability to choose what we want which is the thing that still keeps me attracted to GNU Linux nonetheless.

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And when it comes to playing multimedia, the market is dominated by proprietary codecs. Although it used to be worse in the past (not that long ago) but thanks to fast internet connections and wizard type GUIs... now you can easily install any software via easy to use graphical utilities or using terminal commands.

But, what if your Linux (Ubuntu in this example) PC does not have an internet connection?. How can you install those multimedia codecs then?. Well, luckily there are offline installers which can come in really handy in those situations.

So, if you have installed Ubuntu 10.10 and looking for an offline multimedia codec pack which lets play almost any type of audio/video files... then this is how you install it.

1. Get the zipped file from here first.

2. Then double click on it and extract it to a desired location (Gnome desktop for instance).

3. Now, inside the extracted folder look for a file called "install.sh" and double click it.

4. Then from the following prompt, choose "run in Terminal" (or it'll automatically launch depending your Nautilus configurations), the installation is automatic and will require the "sudo" password. Once it's done you'll be notified with a message saying "now you can close the terminal window". Then close your terminal window.

Now you should be able to play almost any type of audio/video files such as AAC, MP3, H.264, H.263, .WMV are just a few to name. This installer also installs other proprietary utilities such as Adobe flash players as well.

Make sure to keep a copy of the downloaded zipped archive and use it whenever you need to install multimedia codecs  on a PC than runs Ubuntu 10.10 (only) when you don't have an internet connection!.