Play MP3, MP4 and other media files in Ubuntu.

Legal issues stop Ubuntu from being able to play MP3, MP4, and other media files out of the box.

Ubuntu can play your audio and video files, you just have to tell it to do so.

Durning installation check (tick) the ‘Enable Restricted Formats‘ box during installation. This will install all the required multi media codecs automatically, along with the OS itself.

If it wasn't done during installation (or upgrade from an earlier release) you can install the multimedia codecs manually via terminal.


Note: Using the sudo command can result in severe system damage. Read all instructions and confirm you understand before executing any commands. Make sure you type commands correctly, or copy and paste the entire code. Your first click will highlight all the code, or you can double click in the code area to do it again.

open up a terminal and run the following command:sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

If you are using Kubuntu: sudo apt-get install kubuntu-restricted-extras
If you are using Xubuntu: sudo apt-get install xubuntu-restricted-extras
If you are using Lubuntu: sudo apt-get install lubuntu-restricted-extras

In order to play DVDs, you need to install libdvdcss by entering the following in a terminal: sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh