Install MPlayer Media Player

At some point you're probably going to want to play a QuickTime, AVI or ASF file so you'll want the MPlayer media player. Fortunately with the FreshRpms repositories it's also very easy to download and install. Then you can go ahead and install mplayer and all it's dependencies:

# yum -y install mplayer mplayer-gui mplayer-skins mplayer-fonts mplayerplug-in

This command line will download the whole kit and kaboodle, command line utilities, plug-ins, etc. If you want to play content from a command line you will want to use thegmplayer  version which will include a skin-able control panel. Restart your web browser after that whole mess is done installing and you'll also have a plug-in for Mozilla so you can play embedded content. While you're at it be sure to configure mplayer to use the ALSA sound system rather than the default. It just works better. Edit the file~/.mplayer/config and add the following line:

ao=alsa

You can enable support for mms streaming by opening Firefox and click on the special URL about:config. Right click on the list and choose New then choose String. For the preference name enter network.protocol-handler.app.mms then for the string value enter gmplayer.

Special 64-bit instructions:
The above installs the 64-bit version of everything but because your other plug-ins are 32-bits you need to run the 32-bit version of Firefox, which won't be able to use the 64-bit version of the plug-in you just installed. The plug-in can use the 64-bit version of the mplayer application just fine so all you need to do then is to install the 32-bit mplayerplug-in plus a dependency it requires. If you know of any easier way to do this please let me know below.

# rpm -ihv http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/7/mplayerplug-in/mplayerplug-in-3.40-1.fc7.i386.rpm

Both 32-bit and 64-bit instructions:
And finally you'll probably also want some additional codecs to play all that proprietary video that seems to have infected the Internet. Go to the MPlayer Download page and download the essential Binaries Codec Package. You'll need to install those files in /usr/local/lib/win32. Here are the steps. Remember the exact file names may change at some point. If you also installed xine you will need a symlink since it expects codecs to be in a different directory.

# gtar xjvf essential-20061022.tar.bz2 
# mkdir /usr/local/lib/win32
# mv essential-20061022/* /usr/local/lib/win32
# ln -s /usr/local/lib/win32 /usr/lib/win32
# ln -s /usr/local/lib/win32 /usr/local/lib/codecs
# ln -s /usr/local/lib/win32 /usr/lib/codecs

Install VLC (VideoLAN Client)

Multimedia can be the achilles heel of Linux, but with just a little work you should be able to play just about anything your friends can. Besides Mplayer the other great video player is called VLC. It too is trivially easy to install once you have your repositories set up:

# yum -y install videolan-client

Once the client and a zillion dependencies get installed you can play a huge variety of video formats easy with the command vlc