Enabling sound

[Daniel Carrera]

Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
> Now to test the .wmv again. Hmm, the Totem movie player gives me the 
> same error message as before:
> 
> "You do not have a decoder installed to handle this file. You might need 
> to install the necessary plugins."

Not sure what to suggest. You might want to do this:

sudo aptitude install totem-xine

You will get a warning that totem-gstreamer will be uninstalled. That's 
fine. Totem has two possible back-ends, one is gstreamer and the other 
is xine. The point of installing totem-xine is to see if that backend 
works any better.

> BTW, I had previously installed the VLC media player, to play .ogg 
> files, which it does just fine, both sound and video. VLC gives me the 
> audio from .wmv, but no video.

I find that VLC, inspite of being the ugliest and least user friendly 
player, has the best support for proprietary formats. So I tend to use 
it as a last resort. In general, if it doesn't work on VLC I don't 
expect it to work on the others.

> Thanks for any help anyone can give me. (I am abysmally ignorant of 
> anything to do with audio and video files, so if I ask wrong or stupid 
> questions, that's why.)

Nothing stupid. Getting proprietary multimedia to work on Ubuntu is not 
trivial. That's partly inevitable, and partly a choice of shipping with 
only free software by default, and partly stuff that just doesn't work 
(*cough* Firefox *cough*).

Cheers,
Daniel.
-- 
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