Configure DivX on Linux

DivX is a video compression technology for the MPEG-4 movie format in which movies are stored on a DVD. About 4 GB of a DVD movie can be compressed into approximately 600 MB in DivX format. They usually have an ‘avi’ extension. Using peer-to-peer file sharing applications like Morpheus you can download movies in DivX format but beware of legal implications. Xine is one of the media players for Linux that can play DivX files among many other formats (see

http://xine.sourceforge.net/). Mount PCQuest’s January 2002 CD and change to the directory cdrom/linux/divx and install the RPMs found in this directory in the following sequence:

rpm —ivh libdvdcss-1.0.0-fr1.i586.rpm



rpm —ivh libdvdread-0.9.2-fr2.i586.rpm


rpm —ivh xine-0.9.6-fr1.i686.rpm

While installing the last RPM if you get a libz.so.1 dependency error suffix –nodeps. Now start X Window and within a terminal window, type

xine

to launch the Xine player. Click on the button labeled ‘://’ and then click on the button labeled ‘file’. Navigate to the directory

where the DivX file–you want to watch–is located and select the file. Click on the playback symbol on the player to play it.