An extremely popular and extremely powerful VLC Media Player by VideoLAN is known for its ability to play just about any media file format you can throw at it.
Great news is that VLC is readily available from Ubuntu default repositories, and you can install it by opening the Ubuntu Software Center, searching for "VLC", and clicking install.
Or you can just open the terminal and run this apt-get command:
$ sudo apt-get install vlc
If this is just too easy or (more likely) you wish to have the latest and greatest version of VLC you can get one from a third party PPA repository. Note though that this is not officially supported by VideoLAN nor Ubuntu, and you just may run into an occasional bug, even though most of the times everything's fine.
A third party repository is maintained by a user djcj at https://launchpad.net/~djcj/+archive/vlc-stable?field.series_filter=precise
You can add this repository by running:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:djcj/vlc-stable
Then update the package database to include the new repository:
$ sudo apt-get update
Now simply install vlc as usual:
$ sudo apt-get install vlc
Also note that if you're gonna be doing any transcoding with VLC you should also install libavcodec-extra, and if you wish to use the VLC browser extension you'll also need browser-plugin-vlc. To make sure you got them all just run:
$ sudo apt-get install vlc libavcodec-extra browser-plugin-vlc
And you're done. For all information about VLC visit its web site at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
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