In order to play WMV files under Ubuntu, the easiest way I found was to download the following two packages via synaptic or apt-get:
– w32codecs (from the medibuntu repository : http://medibuntu.org/)
– Mplayer / Gnome-mplayer
Two quick notes:
– Opening the WMV files in VLC will not work
– Installing only mplayer didn’t work. While realising that there was a missing component, the automatically plugin download check fif not work for me, so the w32codec package was necessary
David Vassallo's Blog 