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What Is A Codec?

A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream or signal. The word codec is a portmanteau of "compressor-decompressor" or, more commonly, "coder-decoder". A codec (the program) should not be confused with a coding or compression format or standard – a format is a document (the standard), a way of storing data, while a codec is a program (an implementation) which can read or write such files. In practice, however, "codec" is sometimes used loosely to refer to formats.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec for more information about codecs.

Codec Installations

Available Codecs from Debian

Many codecs are already available in the official Debian archive. Codecs available include codecs for MP3, H264, and AAC encoding and decoding. These codecs are made available through libraries such as the libav/ffmpeg libraries. Media players available in Debian such as VLC and Mplayer make use of these libraries in order to provide support for playback of files encoded through these many different codecs.

In summary, when you install a media player available from Debian, the many different codecs the media player supports will be automatically installed. Chances are, the codecs you will ever wish to use will be the ones automatically installed with the media player you install. If however, you find that a codec you need isn't available from your media player, you may need to install a few extra packages. Below is information on how to install these extra packages, some from Debian, and some available through third parties.

Extra codec packages from Debian

Testing/Unstable Suite

As mentioned in the previous section, the libav/ffmpeg libraries are used to provide codecs for many different media players. There are alternate versions of these library packages that provide extra codecs. The names of the packages are libavcodec-extra-53 libavdevice-extra-53 libavfilter-extra-2 libavformat-extra-53 libavutil-extra-51 libpostproc-extra-52 libswscale-extra-2. These packages are available through Debian main, so to install them, simply run the following command.

apt-get install libavcodec-extra-53 libavdevice-extra-53 libavfilter-extra-2 libavformat-extra-53 libavutil-extra-51 libpostproc-extra-52 libswscale-extra-2

Codec packages from debian-multimedia.org

  1. Install the Debian Multimedia Keyring, downloading it from http://debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/d/debian-multimedia-keyring/debian-multimedia-keyring_2010.12.26_all.deb

  2. Depending on your chosen release, add one of the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

    deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org squeeze main non-free
    deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org wheezy main non-free
    deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org sid main non-free
  1. After editing sources update the package cache.

    apt-get update

Visit Debian Multimedia homepage for mirrors and more details about the project.

Debian Squeeze

Install the following packages:

aptitude install gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 gstreamer0.10-plugins-really-bad ffmpeg sox twolame vorbis-tools lame faad

If you get an error message about DVD Subpicture Decoder missing also install the following:

aptitude install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad

Debian Wheezy

Install the following packages:

aptitude install gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg ffmpeg sox twolame vorbis-tools lame faad

DIVX, Quick Time, Real Video, Windows Media, etc...
  1. Do the following (if you're using 64-bit version of Debian, install the w64codecs package):

apt-get install w32codecs
  1. To see what codecs are included in w32codecs:

apt-cache show w32codecs

DVD Playback

DVDs are usually encrypted with CSS. To read them, you must install the following packages:

apt-get install libdvdcss2 vlc 

You can replace vlc with totem-xine, gnome-mplayer or another program capable of playing DVDs depending on your taste.

More information

Windows Media Video playback