Contents • • • • • • • • • • • • What Is A Codec? As the page on codecs at says: 'A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream or signal. The word codec is a portmanteau of 'compressor-decompressor' or, more commonly, 'coder-decoder'. Astro22 Professional Astrology Associations. A codec (the program) should not be confused with a coding or compression format or standard – a format is a document (the standard), a way of storing data, while a codec is a program (an implementation) which can read or write such files. In practice, however, 'codec' is sometimes used loosely to refer to formats.'

See for more information about codecs. Codec Installations Available Codecs for Debian Many codecs are already available in the official Debian archive. These include codecs for MP3, H264, and AAC encoding and decoding. These codecs are made available through libraries such as the libav/ffmpeg libraries. Media players available in Debian such as VLC and Mplayer make use of these libraries in order to provide support for playback of files encoded through these many different codecs. In summary, when you install a media player available from Debian, many different codecs the media player supports will be automatically installed.

View package lists View the packages in the stable distribution. This is the latest official release of the Debian distribution. This is stable and well tested. INSTALL OTHER LIBRARIES/FORMATS Anything else you would like to install should be done now, before compiling FFMPEG. This includes MP3, AAC, etc.

Chances are, the codecs you will ever wish to use will be the ones automatically installed with the media player. If however, you find that a codec you need isn't available from your media player, you may need to install a few extra packages. How to install these extra packages, some from Debian and some available through third parties, is explained below. Extra codec packages from Debian Testing/Unstable Suite As mentioned in the previous section, the libav/ffmpeg libraries are used to provide codecs for many different media players. There are alternate versions of these library packages that provide extra codecs.

The extra codecs provided by the package are: • OpenCORE Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) Narrow-Band (AMRNB Encoder/Decoder) • OpenCORE Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) Wide-Band (AMRWB Decoder) • Android VisualOn AAC (AAC Encoder) • Android VisualOn Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) Wide-Band (AMRWB Encoder) This package is available through Debian main. To install it simply run (as root) the following command: apt-get install libavcodec-extra Codec packages from third parties.

Warning Installation of third party packages is not recommended. Use at your own risk. This section describes installation of packages from third party repositories. Korg M1 Mac Serial Port more.

The packages in these repositories are not as thoroughly tested as packages in the official Debian archive. The problems with third party packages can include, but is not limited to • Package conflicts between packages in the Debian archive and packages in third party repositories. • Bad package upgrades between Debian releases. • Difficulty removing third party packages once installed.