Ubuntu – How to install the MPEG-4 AAC decoder and the H.264 decoder

If you want the H.264 encoder, then

sudo apt-get install h264enc

will install H.264 in your system.

No need to spend this ridiculous amount of money on some codecs! Use it to make a donation or buy some flowers instead. This is a free way:

Make sure to install both mplayer and lame. To do this open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T or Super+T) and paste (Ctrl+Shift+V) the following line and hit Enter to run:

sudo apt-get install mplayer lame

Enter your password when prompted.

Then navigate to the folder containing your WMAs and run the following command in the same terminal:

for i in *.wma ; do mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader "$i" && lame -m j -h --vbr-new -b 320 audiodump.wav -o "`basename "$i" .wma`.mp3"; done; rm -f audiodump.wav

This will create 320 kbps MP3s in the same directory, keeping the original files. These MP3s will not contain ID3 data (title, artist, album, etc). GMusicBrowser is excellent for modifying this information.

Thanks to Rory Alsop for the one-line script which needed a slight update. Here he also shows how to make it so that you can run this script in the future by typing a single word in the terminal.