video/x-asf-unknown or MSS2 are two codecs required to play windows media files. If you’re unable to play them on your using regular media players on your Ubuntu, install Mplayer and you should be good to play any WMA files.

VLC media player is a media player, streamer, and encoder for Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, QNX, and PocketPC. It can play from many inputs like files, network streams, capture device, desktops, or DVD, SVCD, VCD, and audio CD.

VLC media player is a media player, streamer, and encoder for Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, QNX, and PocketPC. It can play from many inputs like files, network streams, capture device, desktops, or DVD, SVCD, VCD, and audio CD.

VLC media player is a media player, streamer, and encoder for Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, QNX, and PocketPC. It can play from many inputs like files, network streams, capture device, desktops, or DVD, SVCD, VCD, and audio CD.

Historically, Linux was unable to play files intended to only be playable with the Windows Media Player. However, with the help of codecs, Linux can play both audio and video files that were previously incompatible. Jack Wallen introduces the major players in the Linux multimedia party.

The application I am referring to, is called KLook. That is “look” prefixed with a “K.” What KLook does, is give you the ability to view images, text files (.txt), listen to audio and play video files from one application in a slideshow fashion.

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE (2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs.

Mencoder is part of the MPlayer media player package. While MPlayer can play audio and video files, mencoder converts and manages multimedia files. The application has a ton of graphical user interfaces, but you can use it from the command line to produce video files in almost any format you want. Here's how.

Recently I have had a lot of people asking how to play various media files in Linux. I thought it would be smart to write about the best tools to play certain media types.