Need Media Player

[Doctor V]

I have come to the conclusion that RealNetworks, like Microsoft, is run by the Nazis.  RealOne's licence agreement didn't impress me.  They too are putting all kinds of DRM into their newest Media Player.  Anyway, I want a media player that runs on Linux that will play most of the major media formats and will hopefully embed into Mozilla, and is preferably open-source.  Any suggestions?

V

[ October 21, 2002: Message edited by: Doctor V ]

[Calum]

what you use is probably it right now.

mozilla and plugger seem fine to me, realplayer will just need to be blocked from phoning home, and remember to use realplayer 8, and no higher version (that goes for windows too)

i have not really used MPlayer or Xine yet, so maybe over to somebody who knows...

[KernelPanic]

mplayer is great.
Voidmain will probably give you the marketing spiel later...

[voidmain]

You need "plugger" and "mplayer". MPlayer plays more formats than any other player that I am aware of (including all the newest M$ and Quicktime formats).

See plugger here:
http://fredrik.hubbe.net/plugger.html

See MPlayer here:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/

You can play many many video formats assuming you have all of the win32 video/audio codecs installed (provided on the MPlayer web site).

Now having said that, some sites that put up video use M$ Windows and M$ IE specific code before the video is played that may give you trouble, however that does not mean MPlayer can not play the video that they provide.

Sometimes you have to "view source" on the M$ specific web pages to find the actual video content/links and bypass the stupid M$ registry checks and *.cab file installations. Then download and play the video or use play it directly from the site using mplayer using the embedded link to the actual video that you found. These are M$ nazi sites but can be gotten around with a certain amount of pain. Well designed web sites you will have no trouble with, even if they use the same video format as the Nazi designed web sites.

[ October 22, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Crunchy(Cracked)Butter]

Why not pay a small amount of $$$ to get the codeweavers mediaplayer pack for linux, with it you get Quicktime and media player 6.4 i think?

[KernelPanic]

because mplayer is free?!?!

[voidmain]

Why would I want that? It gives me no more than MPlayer gives me. In fact it gives me much less since MPlayer can play a lot more formats.. Besides that, I don't want any Windows software running on my computer though crappy emulation.

[Doctor V]

Thanks, MPlayer works great from the command line, but I still havn't figured out how to get it embedded into Mozilla.  I havn't found alot of documentation for Plugger.

V

[voidmain]

What do you get when you do a "Help"->"About Plug-ins" in Mozilla? You should get something like this:

Code: [Select]

If so, you have properly installed plugger. Now you need to tell plugger what to use for each media type. This was pretty much configured properly for me when I installed the plugger RPM in RedHat8 but I still wanted to use mplayer over other apps for most types. This is done in the "/etc/pluggerrc" file. You'll find an entry for every mime type. For instance I change the section for "video/quicktime" from:

Code: [Select]

to

Code: [Select]

I'm no expert on the pluggerrc file and if I were I would clean up all the references to other players and use only mplayer for all of it's supported media types.

When you get it configured the way you think it should work go to the test page on the plugger site and try all the video types to make sure they play embedded in Mozilla:

http://fredrik.hubbe.net/plugger/test.html

If you still can't get it to work let me know and we'll figure it out.

The man page really does look helpful (man plugger) and I believe one of these days I'll go though it and tweak the mimetypes exactly as I want them.

On a side note, did you get the GUI interface for mplayer (gmplayer)? It's pretty slick and looks a lot like the xine interface.

[ October 22, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Doctor V]

Still hasn't worked.  I tried both Plugger 4.0 and 3.3, and both the rpms and tar.gz's for each.  I followed the installation instructions, and even tried manually copying the plugger, pluggerrc, and plugger.so files to the ./mozilla and plugins directory.  No luck.  I'm useing Mozilla 1.2 beta.  I wonder if that has anything to do with it.

V

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by Doctor V:
Still hasn't worked.  I tried both Plugger 4.0 and 3.3, and both the rpms and tar.gz's for each.  I followed the installation instructions, and even tried manually copying the plugger, pluggerrc, and plugger.so files to the ./mozilla and plugins directory.  No luck.  I'm useing Mozilla 1.2 beta.  I wonder if that has anything to do with it.

V

Help me out here. Does "plugger" show up in "Help"->"About Plug-ins"? Do you have JavaScript turned on?

[ October 22, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Doctor V]

Help --> About Plug ins gives me this:

------------------------------------------------

Installed plug-ins
Find more information about browser plug-ins at Netscape.com.
Plugger 4.0

    File name: plugger.so

MIME Type Description Suffixes Enabled


-------------------------------------------------


so it detects Plugger, but dosn't list any mime types.

V

[ October 23, 2002: Message edited by: Doctor V ]

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by Doctor V:
so it detects Plugger, but dosn't list any mime types.

Then it must not be finding your "pluggerrc" file, or you do not have any mimetypes configured in your pluggerrc. Do you have an /etc/pluggerrc? Also, you might want to go through some of these Q & As:

http://fredrik.hubbe.net/plugger/troubleshooting.html

[ October 23, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Doctor V]

Running make install in the plugger directory copies plugger.so to    /usr/local/lib/netscape
plugger-4.0 to   /usr/local/bin
and pluggerrc to /etc/pluggerrc-4.0

with this alone, Help --> About Plugins in Mozilla dosn't even show Plugger at all.  Awter a while of tinkering, I deleted the files and tried somthing different.

Installing it locally using make localinstall puts them into .netscape. So I tried putting it into the .mozilla directory.  It showed what I posted above only after copying plugger.so to ./mozilla/plugins.  I did also cpoy the other two files to .mozilla.  

Not working, I deleted the copied files, and went ahead and copied them all to ./netscape.  That didn't work.  Nothing at all showed up in Mozilla's Help --> About Plugins

V

[voidmain]

You have to make sure the plugin goes into the right directory. On my RedHat 8.0 system that directory is "/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins". Hmmm, I just downloaded the tar.gz file and unwrapped it, it does say that the file included with that package should be named /etc/pluggerrc-4.0, however on my system it needs to be "/etc/pluggerrc" (I installed it from RPM). Maybe it really needs to be "/etc/pluggerrc" (without the "-4.0").

Did you mention which Linux distro you are using? I didn't see that anywhere. If you are using an RPM based distro, try the RPM.

[ October 23, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]