Centos 6/RHEL install VLC and codecs

VLC is one of the more popular media players for Linux. It is an extremely versatile player, being able to play a large variety of file formats & it is a great alternative to SMPlayer.

It will also perform other tasks such as file conversion, video capture and streaming via the media tab which offers a variety of options from convert to stream, capture and others, have a look
on the wiki for more info or you can check the man pages.

$ man vlc 

You can also listen to web radio and podcasts from the View/Playlist menu (Ctrl+L), scroll down the list on the let to the internet link and expand it. Enter the url for a  new podcast with the + sign or use the Icecast Radio Directory or radio feeds

As with SMPlayer it is available in the Rpmforge repo and installation will bring with it some required libraries.

So first get Rpmforge repo

$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://pkgs.repoforge.org/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.i686.rpm

$ sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo

and disable it by default.

$ sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo

See Vi and Vim commands

Install it 

$ sudo yum -y --enablerepo=rpmforge install vlc

Run it with

$ vlc

See Fluxbox key bindings for more if using it.

You may want some extra codecs such as Win32, gstreamer etc, or to install SMPlayer also.


You can also install Totem, another popular player with a simple

$ sudo yum -y install totem

if you have Epel repo.

For more repositories see repo page