Comment 3 for bug 72628

I'm a newbie. I can't get movies (mpeg, avi, wmv) to play in Movie Player or Noatun (apparently I don't have the appropriate decoder). I've searched for, and installed, anything and everything that looks like it could be relevant. No luck.
It would be really nice to have some simple way of installing "popular needed packages" although it would be even nicer if Movie Player et al offered to install relevant packages when first downloaded.
Anyway, I did come across easyubuntu and thought it just the thing. Unfortunately, though easyubuntu claimed to install three packages for me, I still can not play any video files. Following ubuntu instructions I get, at one point, the error message
"svn: Berkeley DB error while opening 'nodes' table for filesystem /home/svn/repos/easyubuntu/db: Cannot allocate memory
svn: bdb: Unable to allocate memory for transaction detail". That is, easyubuntu is useless for me.

I know it is possible to play mpegs in Movie Player under Ubuntu, for I have it working on another machine, set up some months ago. But I remember it taking me many, many hours spread over many days to finally get the right files downloaded. I have no interest in going through that hassle again. There has got to be a better way.