Streaming Windows media files (WMV and WMA) from Firefox in Ubuntu has been a known problem for a long time. At the same time, a lot of web media content is encoded in these formats, making it a real pain that they are not working.

There are various plugins that claim to work, but I have had some bad experiences with some not working and others creating lags and stop working after a few minutes. Now, let’s put an end to this and install a plugin that just works flawlessly.

You just need to install one package: gecko-mediaplayer. As usual, you can use the Ubuntu graphical tools, or do it on the command line:

sudo apt-get install gecko-mediaplayer

Now restart Firefox, and you should be able to play any Windows media files directly from your browser. Simple as that!

I have tested it in Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid), but it should work on all recent versions of Ubuntu.