monline

I've already found out how to use VLC to play Quicktime videos. Now I've faced some issues with WMV files. VLC did not play the WMV properly (it showed some "noise" instead of the real content), neither did any other player (like Kaffeine, Xine, Mplayer). For Xine I had to set the video output from "auto" to "xshm". For Mplayer I had to choose the "X11" video setting (this can be set globally in /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf).

However to play WMV files you most probably need some additional codecs. You can grab most of them at the Mplayer website, but some of them you'll have to add manually. The codecs must be put into /usr/lib/codecs (that's where Xine-based players look) and a symlink should be created on this dir to point to /usr/lib/win32 since Mplayer looks there. The missing codecs should be copied to this dir too, eg. I had a WMV for which Mplayer complained about the missing "wmv8ds32.ax" library. It could still play the WMV using some other codec, but displayed an error message every time I played the video.