I have just installed centos 4 and am doing an upgrade to the 4.2 version now, should I enable any extra repositories in CENTOS as you would have to in fedora. If yes what are reliable repos and how do I enable them ?

will this method work to install the mplayer codecs in centos
download from here
http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/rel...050412.tar.bz2 ,
then untar/decompress it
tar xjvf all-20050412.tar.bz2

and change the name of the folder to "codecs", move it to /usr/lib/.
mv all-20050412 /usr/lib/codecs

After that, make a "win32" folder link to it with
ln -s /usr/lib/codecs /usr/lib/win32

The method above will work, I tend to extract them to /usr/local/win32 befcause I use Xine/totem. As for repos, there aren;t many third pary repos for CentOS or RHEL because they are very server oriented. You can however add dags repo.