Eric Bélanger schrieb:
None of the A/V apps in Arch (at least in extra repo) use the codecs so installing the codecs package might have no effect. Most popular video formats are handled well by ffmpeg. I would suggest to post back if you have problems playing a specific video format.
At least mplayer uses them for formats it doesn't support natively (not too many) and you can use codecs.conf to prefer the binary codecs over the native ones. I think it is similar for xine(-lib) and thus for basically any video application in KDE or GNOME. That said, virtually every video I have come across in the last few years plays fine with the codecs that are natively compiled into mplayer, vlc or xine. The codecs package was important to make mplayer useful over 5 years ago, but not anymore. In contrary to SuSE, all those packages are contained in our main repositories with all codecs enabled, so there is nothing special to do besides pacman'ing those packages.