Multimedia, codecs, MP3, DVD support on RHEL, CentOS, AlmaLinux, Oracle Linux

Linux users desesperately looking for multimedia support (generated by Midjourney). Credit: libre-software.net. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Multimedia, codecs, MP3 & DVD support on RHEL, CentOS, AlmaLinux, Oracle Linux …

Last updated on October 10, 2022

This article has been archived and may contain outdated information.

This tutorial details how to install full multimedia support, media codecs, MP3 & DVD support on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its derivatives CentOS, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux or Oracle Linux.

Note: if you did’t add yourself to the sudoers, just rund every command of this howto as root, without the sudo prefix. Or follow this tutorial to add yourself to the sudoers.

Multimedia on CentOS, Red Hat, Scientific Linux - Gstreamer Logo by Christophe Dumas (GPL)

Install GStreamer packages

Following packages should already be installed by default on a fresh RHEL / CentOS Oracle Linux (…) installation:

sudo yum install gstreamer gstreamer-plugins-base gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad-free

Install the GStreamer modules which are available in the RPMForge repository – note that there are quite a few dependencies:

sudo yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-ffmpeg

Apart of containing decoders, gstreamer-ffmpeg is the plugin Gnome needs to generate thumbnails for the file browser (Nautilus) and the desktop. Find more information on GStreamer modules on the GStreamer website.

Some of the dependencies are no less than ffmpeg (one of the most important codecs), lame, libcdaudio, libdvdread, libmodplug, libmpeg2, libquicktime, mjpegtools, x264 and xvidcore. Most of them are from RPMforge.

Install more codecs for CentOS

Give mplayer a try:

sudo yum install mplayer mplayer-gui

Once again, there are many dependencies for mplayer, among them esound-libs, libcaca (sic!), libvdpau, mpg123 and svgalib.

Finally, take a look at this page if you feel you’ll be missing w32codecs.

Add libdvdcss for DVD support

Following packages are available from RPMforge:
sudo yum install libdvdnav libdvdplay lsdvd

The problematic package is libdvdcss, as it is not available through RPMforge. Libdvdcss can be obtained from Livna:
sudo rpm -Uvh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm

Alternatively, you can browse Livna to download the package by yourself.

Media Player and Codex on Linux, Red Hat, CentOS - VLC Logo

Install VLC Media Player

A Linux installation wouldn’t be complete without the King of all Video players, also available through RPMforge (it also has quite a few dependencies):
sudo yum install vlc

That’s all! You should now be able to play any media format on CentOS.

By Johannes Eva, 2012 – October 2022
This article has been linked on LXer.com and some more…

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Comments

15 thoughts on “How to install LibreOffice 24.2 on Linux Mint, Ubuntu, MX Linux, Debian…”

  1. Tim

    You may use the official appimage in Libre Office as well. In fact, on Linux Mint 21 you can’t get rid of the default LO as it may lead to dependency issues. Appimage helps.

  2. Pingback: Ubuntu 21.04: Essentials – Linux Sagas

  3. Jonatan Tisnado

    Issuing $ sudo apt-get remove libreoffice-core installs an office core no gui. With or without purging. Yielding this:
    The following packages will be REMOVED:
    libreoffice-base libreoffice-calc libreoffice-core libreoffice-draw libreoffice-gnome libreoffice-gtk3 libreoffice-impress libreoffice-lightproof-ru-ru libreoffice-math libreoffice-nlpsolver libreoffice-report-builder libreoffice-report-builder-bin libreoffice-script-provider-python libreoffice-sdbc-postgresql libreoffice-wiki-publisher python3-uno
    The following NEW packages will be installed:
    libreoffice-core-nogui
    Many thanks for any clarification!

    1. Coruscant

      Right! The correct command for removing completely the stock LibreOffice on Linux is the following:
      sudo apt purge libreoffice-common

      The following command also works but misses some packages:
      sudo apt purge libreoffice*

      Thank you for your comment, I updated the article accordingly.

  4. Cyteck

    NOTE:- I found that Libre Office version 6.3.2.2 is extremely buggy, it has major dependency problems attempting to install on Linux Mint (Tina 19.2). I wasn’t able to resolve these problems so had to revert the install (remove 6.3.2.2-2) and return to previous version 6.3.1 which works fine.

    **Windows 10 (1903) ALSO NOTE that LO 6.3.2.2 installs on W10 but also caused major performance issues and hung my system on reboot. My machine Borked badly so once again had to revert back to LO 6.3.1 which works fine.

  5. Daniels

    Thanks for the Terminal codes. Newbies like me just want it to work and your codes provide the copy and paste necessities for Linux to do its magic.

    (If it can’t be done in Linux (and LibreOffice) its not worth doing)

  6. n1kk

    please help me with this error, newbee here

    root@Anon:~/libreoffice# sudo dpkg -i *.deb
    dpkg: error: dpkg status database is locked by another process
    root@Anon:~/libreoffice# cd LibreOffice_6.0.2.1_Linux_x86_deb
    root@Anon:~/libreoffice/LibreOffice_6.0.2.1_Linux_x86_deb# sudo dpkg -i *.deb
    dpkg: error: dpkg status database is locked by another process
    root@Anon:~/libreoffice/LibreOffice_6.0.2.1_Linux_x86_deb# cd debs
    bash: cd: debs: No such file or directory
    root@Anon:~/libreoffice/LibreOffice_6.0.2.1_Linux_x86_deb# cd DEBS
    root@Anon:~/libreoffice/LibreOffice_6.0.2.1_Linux_x86_deb/DEBS# sudo dpkg -i *.deb
    dpkg: error: dpkg status database is locked by another process
    root@Anon:~/libreoffice/LibreOffice_6.0.2.1_Linux_x86_deb/DEBS# sudo dpkg -i *.deb
    dpkg: error: dpkg status database is locked by another process

    1. Coruscant

      The last line says it all: check if you are running another instance of dpkg. In last resort, try to remove dpkg lock file:

      sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/lock

      Then let dpkg fix itself:
      sudo dpkg --configure -a

      Note that this problem is not per se related to LibreOffice.

  8. Me

    Would be useful to know how to install such alongside the native repository install of LibreOffice – without conflict. Would be useful to be able to choose, say, LibreOffice Writer 5.2, vs just LibreOffice Writer. Migrations / new versions not always working as seamlessly as one might like with files one might already have. It can be very frustrating to have a new version munge (e.g. formatting) of a current document one depends on, and not being able to ‘un-munge’ it.

  10. Kuku Juhi

    Works well. The only problem I had is that the icons were not created. I created them manually by running Writer, Calc and Impress and the using the “Lock to Launcher” option. This is how to run them from the terminal:

    Writer: /opt/libreoffice5.0/program/oosplash –writer
    Calc: /opt/libreoffice5.0/program/oosplash –calc
    Impress: /opt/libreoffice5.0/program/oosplash –impress

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