Codec tool

[yessirsir]

is there a tool that identifies which codec a video needs in order to be played ?

[wolfen69]

not that i know of, but doing

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

will give you pretty much everything you need.

[lovinglinux]

I guess Movie Player (GStreamer) checks for codecs and ask if you want to download it.

There is an application for Windows called AVIcodec, but I couldn't make it work under Wine