Fedora Multimedia Installation HOWTO 5.1

Fedora Multimedia Installation HOWTO will explain how to get various multimedia apps working under Fedora Core.

How to get various proprietary and restricted multimedia Damned Things (AVI, Flash, Java, MP3, MPEG, QuickTime, RealMedia, Windows Media) working under Fedora Core using your normal package-management tools. Includes Firefox-plugin instructions. Now with coverage of both 32- and 64-bit Intel-architecture systems.

Unfortunately, the news in FC5 is almost all bad. Totem and Xine are both completely broken.

There are some Damned Things like enabling Java and Flash in Mozilla, playing MP3 files, playing Quicktime/AVI/RealMedia/Windows Media streams, and playing encrypted DVDs that the Fedora distro folks wont tell you how to do, either because theyre afraid of being sued under the DMCA or for various other esthetic and political reasons.

This HOWTO collects the relevant information in one place. It is not a general multimedia-on-Linux HOWTO; if it were, there are hundreds of nifty tools and packages it would list (starting with the GIMP and all its kindred and forks and symbiotes). The packages well cover here are just the legal and political hot potatoes, the stuff that threatens monopolies and worries lawyers.