The default installation of Fedora includes Rhythmbox and Totem for media playback. The Fedora repositories include many other popular programs such as the XMMS player and KDE's amaroK. Both GNOME and KDE have a selection of players that can be used with a variety of formats. Third parties may offer additional programs to handle other formats.

Fedora includes complete support for the Ogg media container format and the Vorbis audio, Theora video, Speex audio and FLAC lossless audio formats. These freely-distributable formats are not encumbered by patent or license restrictions. They provide powerful and flexible alternatives to more popular, restricted formats. The Fedora Project encourages the use of open source formats in place of restricted ones. For more information on these formats and how to use them, refer to the Xiph.Org Foundation's web site at http://www.xiph.org/.

Fedora cannot include support for MP3 or DVD video playback or recording. The MP3 formats are patented, and the patent holders have not provided the necessary licenses. DVD video formats are patented and equipped with an encryption scheme. The patent holders have not provided the necessary licenses, and the code needed to decrypt CSS-encrypted discs may violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a copyright law of the United States. Fedora also excludes other multimedia software due to patent, copyright, or license restrictions, including Adobe's Flash Player and Real Media's Real Player. For more on this subject, please refer to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems.

While other MP3 options may be available for Fedora, Fluendo now offers an MP3 plugin for GStreamer that has the related patents licensed for end users. This plugin enables MP3 support in applications that use the GStreamer framework as a backend. We cannot distribute this plugin in Fedora for licensing reasons, but it offers a new solution for an old problem. For more information, refer to the Installing Fluendo MP3 Plug-in or Installing MP3 Plug-in with Codeina pages.

Fedora include a variety of tools for easily mastering and burning CDs and DVDs. GNOME users can burn directly from the Nautilus file manager. The Fedora software repositories also contain additional software, such as brasero , gnomebaker , or k3b , for these tasks. Console tools include wodim, readom, genisoimage, and other popular applications.

You can use Fedora to create and play back screencasts, which are recorded desktop sessions, using open technologies. Fedora includes istanbul , which creates screencasts using the Theora video format, and 'byzanz', which creates screencasts as animated GIF files. You can play back these videos using one of several players included in Fedora. This is the preferred way to submit screencasts to the Fedora Project for either developers or end-users. For more comprehensive instructions, refer to the ScreenCasting page.

Most of the media players in Fedora support the use of plugins to add support for additional media formats and sound output systems. Some use powerful backends like the gstreamer package to handle media format support and sound output. Fedora offers plugin packages for these backends and for individual applications, and third parties may offer additional plugins to add even greater capabilities.