Playing RMVB files in Ubuntu Hardy
Thursday, 17. July 2008, 16:32:51
I copied today some videos from a friend and they were in the RMVB video format. RMVB is a RealVideo related format of which is relatively hard to find a player to reproduce it, AFAIK.
Luckily MPlayer comes to our help. But wait a second, the normal MPlayer installation from the repositories does not include codecs for RMVB so if you already have MPlayer installed you probably would still be unable to play these files.
So I went to Google to find out any information about RMVB on linux and I found this post which pointed me to the download page for the extra binary codecs for mplayer, and listed other necessary instructions. Once I downloaded it and put it in the location specified in this post MPlayer was still unable to properly play my videos
So I suspected that maybe the /usr/lib/win32 folder might not be the expected location anymore, as the mentioned post is about a year old already and Ubuntu and MPlayer have changed. Then I realized, hey, all serious stuff should have a README file, so these codecs package should have a README file too. As I suspected, I typed in my terminal
And this file explains quite clearly that the codecs should be located in the folder /usr/lib/codecs for mplayer to find them. It even mentions /usr/lib/win32 as the previous location which is no longer in use by mplayer, although some other players still use it.
So I decided to keep these codecs at both locations so instead of renaming the win32 folder to codecs, I made a soft link:
And that's it! Now mplayer works just fine with RMVB.
UPDATE: If at this point there's some .rmvb still resisting, install the libstdc++5 package:
Luckily MPlayer comes to our help. But wait a second, the normal MPlayer installation from the repositories does not include codecs for RMVB so if you already have MPlayer installed you probably would still be unable to play these files.
So I went to Google to find out any information about RMVB on linux and I found this post which pointed me to the download page for the extra binary codecs for mplayer, and listed other necessary instructions. Once I downloaded it and put it in the location specified in this post MPlayer was still unable to properly play my videos
So I suspected that maybe the /usr/lib/win32 folder might not be the expected location anymore, as the mentioned post is about a year old already and Ubuntu and MPlayer have changed. Then I realized, hey, all serious stuff should have a README file, so these codecs package should have a README file too. As I suspected, I typed in my terminal
$ less /usr/lib/win32/README
And this file explains quite clearly that the codecs should be located in the folder /usr/lib/codecs for mplayer to find them. It even mentions /usr/lib/win32 as the previous location which is no longer in use by mplayer, although some other players still use it.
So I decided to keep these codecs at both locations so instead of renaming the win32 folder to codecs, I made a soft link:
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/win32 /usr/lib/codecs
And that's it! Now mplayer works just fine with RMVB.
UPDATE: If at this point there's some .rmvb still resisting, install the libstdc++5 package:
sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
WIDGETIZE