The ultimate codec guide

OK, so you want to use your Mplayer to play all the media files, including the famous RMVB? Follow this commands:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
add the following lines:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu intrepid universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu intrepid universe multiverse

sudo apt-get update
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.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 apt-get install w32codecs libdvdcss2

Now, open up your Mplayer, right click on the video window, go to preferences:
Select the Video tab and change the Available drivers: to x11 X11 (XImage/Shm).
Select the Codecs & demuxer tab and change the Video codec family: to RealVideo decoder and the Audio codec family: to FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders. When you’re done, click OK and close down MPlayer.

You’re ready to go. Open an rmvb file with mplayer, it should do the trick

Subtitles issues in MPlayer

This tip is mainly for Portuguese guys ;). So, did you ever got annoyed because some subtitles change “ás vezes” to ” ? vezes”. Words with ‘ or ` get all messed up? here’s the solution:

Go to your home folder, open up “.mplayer” , edit the config file and paste this:

[default]
subfont-text-scale = 5
subfont-osd-scale = 5
fontconfig = yes
subcp = iso8859-1

Try it now :) you can edit the subtitles size at your way of course

Miss windows live messenger on ubuntu?

You won’t miss it anymore. Try for yourself:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install emesene

Check their forum for themes, emoticons and sounds:

http://emesene.org/smf/index.php?action=forum

Features:

Emesene features:

* Clean and easy to use GUI
* Tabbed chat
* Custom emoticons
* File transfers
* Offline messaging
* Personal messages
* Nudges
* Multilingual GUI
* Customization
o Themes
o Smileys
o Sounds
o GUI
o Conversation format
* Plugins
* MSN Plus!
* Chat logging

Features available in development versions

* Webcam receiving
* Winks