The first thing you should do once you have installed Fedora on your machine is to install all the multimedia codecs. This is because Fedora doesn’t ship the codecs due to licensing restrictions. Without installing the media codecs  if you want to watch movies or listen to music, your choice is severely limited.

The good news is, it is quite easy to install all the media codecs in Fedora. Here is how it is done.

Step 1:  Add the RPMFusion repository to Fedora

Visit rpmfusion.org website and enable RPM Fusion on your system.

For Fedora 15 (Lovelock) the procedure is as follows :

Open a terminal and run the following command -

su -c 'yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-rawhide.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-rawhide.noarch.rpm'

For a different version of Fedora, visit the RPMFusion configuration page and choose the appropriate command.

Optional step: Verify the RPM Fusion’s signing keys.

There is nothing to it. Just run the following two commands in your terminal and compare the output with the keys listed on the RPM Fusion keys page. They should match.

gpg --quiet --with-fingerprint /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-free-fedora-15-primary

and

gpg --quiet --with-fingerprint /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-nonfree-fedora-15-primary

To know more about GPG keys read this article.

Step 2: Update your system

su -c 'yum update -y'

Step 3: Install the gstreamer restricted plugins

su -c 'yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-bad-free gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly'

The download size is around 5.1 MB so it should be quick even on a slow Internet connection.

That done,  you will be able to play music and videos of any file format in Totem – the default media player shipped with Fedora.

I tested playing the following media file formats with success – avi, wmv, mp4, flv, and mp3.  It is my conviction that all media files will play in Fedora now.

Note: If you are averse to carrying out the above mentioned steps, you can use the FedoraPlus program to install all the media codecs in Fedora 15.

FedoraPlus automates the process of installing all the restricted codecs in Fedora.

I haven’t tested the program though as the prior mentioned steps work for me flawlessly.

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