To be able to do any kind of music or video you will have to install some software since Fedora does not come with any software that is closed source or has licensing issues. This is an admirable sentiment and one that makes a lot of sense in case you are company such as Red Hat. However, for you to even listen to music or watch DVDs, you will need to install some software or plugins. This is where the freshRPMs website which we activated in the previous page comes in handy .
To watch DVDs on my laptop, I prefer to use Xine. Installing Xine is a simple matter. Simply use
yum install xine xine-skins
Yum will automatically download and install all it needs to successfully install the Xine UI which is really the frontend for the Xine library. Once you install this, you will also need to all the codecs which are available from the mplayer website (see resources). Now run Xine and configure to your hearts content.
Caveat I have noticed that if you try to configure Xine and if one of the configurations involves a drop-down box, then your system will freeze, your CPU will jump to 100% and you will not be able to use your system. The only way to get out is to kill the Xine process. Other than this, there are no other issues that I am aware of. You can always configure xine manually. To do this, simply edit ~/.xine/config. Note that this is not for the faint of heart. The default settings should work for most situations.
Rhythmbox is the Gnome music player that is the default in FC5. However, you can't really do much with it given the licensing issues we talked about. So, you will need to augment the player with other plugins that will allow you to play the music you want such as MP3s stored our hard driver or available on the net. To get Rhythmbox up to speed, we need to get all the plugins necessary to play at least the MP3 files. This is as simple as
yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly
yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad
Once you do that, open rhythmbox, load your music library and you are away! One thing that rhythmbox does not do is display the album covers that some other music library programs do by default or through some plugin mechanism. One of these applications is called Quod Libet. This software does a number of things that may appeal to you. Check it out (see resources). There is also a nice article from the LWN website that discusses various music managers for linux (see resources).
Gnome comes with an application to rip and burn CDs. However, I prefer to use Grip which is a Gnome CD ripping and MP3 (or ogg) encoding frontend. I think it is very fast and efficient method for ripping and encoding CDs to MP3 in one go. All aspects of the software are configurable. It will also create a CD database for you if you have have the companion program DigitalDJ installed. To install Grip simply use yum
yum install grip
and it will installed on your system. You can installed DigitalDJ from the author's (mike Oliphant) website (see resources).