This page is a duplicate of RestrictedFormats/NonNativeCodecs

Playing WMV, WMA, and RealPlayer formats

• i386 architecture

  • Support for WMV, RealMedia and other formats has been bundled into the w32codecs package. This package is not available from the Ubuntu repositories or supported by Ubuntu, due to licensing and legal restrictions. You can download the package from debian-multimedia.org:

• wget -c http://www.debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/w/w32codecs/w32codecs_20071007-0.1_i386.deb
  sudo dpkg -i w32codecs_20071007-0.1_i386.deb

  • For users of command-line browsers, you can use this tinyurl in place of the URL given above: http://tinyurl.com/37mtjp

  • Note: The w32codecs package from the Debian repositories have been tested and work with Ubuntu systems however not all Debian packages will work correctly with Ubuntu, so for your safety do not add Debian repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list

  • WMV files encoded with DRM (Digital Rights Management) cannot be played with this package.

  • If you are experiencing choppy audio when playing WMV files, try the fix described here.

  • If you still cannot play WMV files after installing w32codecs, try the method suggested here.

• AMD64 architecture

  • The Windows Codecs package cannot be used directly by the AMD64 distribution. However, this has now been solved without resorting to a chroot environment. For details please see AMD64

• PowerPC architecture

• The PowerPC distribution cannot use the Windows Codecs. WRONG! See below.

---

I don't understand why such a complicated help article has to be here - have a look at the medibuntu repository: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu There is a easy install instruction, and easy install of w32codecs and also, and this without using chroot w64codecs and the so called ppccodecs which are the same for the ppc architecture. Because I am really sure that the change of this article would be reverted without reading it, I instead put this little remark here, so that the orginial author can take a short look at it and see for himself that it is the best solution under Ubuntu for this issues.