Get Multimedia support

Please note that Xubuntu comes with very limited multimedia support. The reason for this is that many popular multimedia formats are not free; they are protected by patent or license restrictions. To prevent problems, Xubuntu ships without support for these formats. Please consider using and supporting open and free multimedia formats such as Ogg Vorbis (Audio) and Ogg Theora (Video).

If, however, you still want to use restricted multimedia formats, you will need to install codecs from the Universe and Multiverse repositories (see the section called “Extra Repositories”). The following command will install the most important codecs and plugins:

sudo apt-get install libxine-extracodecs ffmpeg lame faad sox mjpegtools gxineplugin flashplugin-nonfree

With these packages installed, you should be able to play many multimedia formats.

Please note that for playing DVDs you need the package libdvdcss2, and for playing additional proprietary Windows formats you need the package w32codecs, which are both not available in the Ubuntu repositories. Please refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RestrictedFormats for the details.