How to install VLC Media Player on Fedora

When it comes to multimedia playback from CD/DVDs or video files on your hard disk, there is one media player that comes to my mind – VLC. VLC Media Player is a free and opensource media player that can play almost anything thrown at it. Let alone media playback; it can even stream content as well as convert media formats! It’s an excellent example of what an opensource community can achieve.

The latest version of Fedora Workstation (Fedora 32 at the time of writing) ships with Totem as the default video player. It is a lightweight application, but it comes with limited functionality and nowhere close to what VLC media player can do. For instance, it can’t even play an MP4 (H.264) video out of the box. I had to install Gstreamer Multimedia Codecs to get going with the video playback.

Totem Media Player Unable to play MP4 out-of-the-box

And VLC was able to play the same video without installing additional packages. It’s simple things like this, which matter for an overall good computing experience.

VLC Media Player

Enough said, let’s see the best features of VLC before jumping on to the installation instructions.

VLC Media Player Features

• Can play multimedia from Files, Discs, Webcams, Devices, and Streams
• Can play most codecs with no need to download additional codec packs
• Can convert between media formats
• Cross-platform compatible: Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android
• Add Watermark to video
• Built-in graphic equalizer
• Screen and webcam recorder built-in
• and more

Installing VLC Media Player on Fedora

If you are intimidated enough to think to install on your Fedora Workstation, below are the command-line and graphical user-interface ways of doing it. Note that VLC is not available in the Fedora repositories. Hence, you must enable a third-party repository from RPM Fusion. It’s all covered in the following tutorial.

Method 1: Using the command-line way via Terminal (recommended)

Step 1: Click ‘Activities’, look for “Terminal,” and launch it.

Step 2: Copy and paste the following in the Terminal to add the RPM Free repository source to Fedora.

sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

Enable RPM Repo -Fedora 32 Terminal

Step 3: Copy and paste the following in the Terminal to add the RPM Non-Free repository source to Fedora. Pay attention to the progress in the Terminal and enter “y” when prompted.

sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

Step 4: Finally, enter the following command to install VLC.

sudo dnf install vlc

Keep looking at the Terminal as it will show a bunch of dependencies. After that, you should enter ‘y’ and press the enter key to start downloading VLC. You will have to do this couple of times.

Installing VLC

That’s it! If everything went well, you should see ‘Complete!’ in the Terminal. Go ahead and look for VLC in the ‘Activities.’

Fedora Applications Menu

Method 2: Using the Software Center

As mentioned earlier, VLC is not found in the Fedora Repo; hence you can’t find it in Fedora’s Software Center.

Step 1. Launch the Fedora Software Center.

Step 2. Click in the tribar on the top right corner of the Software Center and select “Software Repositories”.

Fedora Software Repo Options

Step 3. Close the Software Center and launch the Terminal app.

Step 4. Enter the following command and press enter to install VLC. You must enter ‘y’ and press enter when prompted. You should also enter the root password when needed.

sudo dnf install vlc

That’s it! Go ahead and look for VLC in the ‘Activities’.

Fedora Applications Menu

That’s all about installing the VLC media player.