Every so often I’ll post something you can yum install that is neat or hip or something. Debian people are probably laughing at me now, but the point is not that yum is easy like apt-get, but that there’s a lot of cool software out there that goes unnoticed. Being able to try it out with a simple yum install just makes it easier to experiment and play around with your desktop.
For instance, yesterday I discovered mplayerplug-in. For a while embedded videos in web pages have been a problem, but no more! Mplayerplug-in is a mozilla plugin that adds support for a whole raft of videos, like quicktime and wmv. It uses mplayer (naturally) for its backend, but it also features advanced high-tech state-of-the-80s gui elements, like “stop” and “rewind.” For mplayer, this is a big step, and it brings a tear to my eye.
mplayerplug-in is hosted by the DAG yum repository, so just make sure that you have dag in your yum.conf. There is a conflict between mplayer as provided by livna and mplayer as provided by dag, but only dag has mplayerplug-in. So just do yum install mplayerplug-in and yum will retrieve the proper version of mplayer for you.
Note that another popular plugin is mozplugger, which also tries to add mplayer support for mozilla. I don’t know what happens when the two collide, so you should edit your /etc/mozpluggerrc and remove the lines that talk about video. Then remove your ~/.mozilla/pluginreg.dat so that the next time you launch mozilla (or a mozilla-based app) it will properly reread the mozpluggerrc.
Mozplugger is great, and I can go to apple.com/trailers with the confidence that movies will play and my friends will be impressed.