Ubuntu Restricted Extras: Installing Multimedia Support, Adobe Flash, Sun's Java Plugin and Microsoft Fonts

ubuntu-restricted-extras installs support for MP3 playback and decoding, support for various other audio formats (GStreamer plugins), Microsoft fonts, Java runtime environment, the Adobe Flash plugin, LAME (to create compressed audio files), and DVD playback. This does not install libdvdcss2, and will not let you play encrypted DVDs. To enable encrypted DVD playback see the installing Medibuntu guide.

You can choose to install the ubuntu-restricted-extras metapackage, which will install all the packages listed below, or chose to install the packages individually.

To install the metapackage, in a terminal type:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Audio/Video Codecs
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly (GStreamer plugins from the "ugly" set)
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad (GStreamer plugins from the "bad" set)
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse
- these package install mp3, DVD, DTS decoding, MPEG, MPEG1, MPEG2, and various other multimedia support.

gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg (FFmpeg plugin for GStreamer)
libmp4v2-0 (MP4 aka AAC library)
libavcodec52 (library to encode decode multimedia streams)
libavformat52 (ffmpeg file format library)
libpostproc51 (postproc shared libraries)
libswscale0 (ffmpeg video scaling library)


Sun's Java Plugin
sun-java6-plugin (Sun's JavaPlug-in, Java SE 6)


Adobe Flash Player
flashplugin-installer (Adobe's Flash Player plugin installer)
- this installs the 32-bit version of Flash. If you want to install Flash on a 64-bit machine, install the other packages manually and follow this guide for installing the 64-bit Flash Player in Ubuntu/Debian.

Microsoft Fonts
ttf-mscorefonts-installer
(Installer for Microsoft TrueType core fonts)


Utilities
unrar (Unarchiver for .rar files, non-free version)

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Reinstallng Media Codecs

Ubuntu strives to make all software that meets the licensing terms in the Ubuntu License Policy available. However patent and copyright restrictions complicate free operating systems distributing software to support proprietary formats.

Ubuntu's commitment to only include completely free software by default means that proprietary media formats are not configured 'out of the box'.

Configuring these formats after a fresh install is simple. This guide will allowing you to play Flash, Java mp3, aac, DVDs ,mp4, avi, wmv and many more formats. It also installs the Microsoft true type fonts for better compatibility with Word documents.

In a terminal type:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

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