Mplayer Frustrations - Getting Closer

Kenny Gow kgfedora at swbell.net
Sat Jul 9 03:13:08 UTC 2005


C.Beamer wrote:
> 
> No, my symptoms are not quite the same.  I get sound and in the window
> where the video is supposed to play, it shows "mplayerplug-in" and it
> shows the text that says the file is streaming, but no video.  When it
> displayed the text that indicates the file is streaming, that's where I
> got the info that the format was "wmv" ;-)
> 

Hello, I was reading along this thread and the mention of CNN video 
caught my eye, so I tried it again. It's never worked for me before on 
Firefox with the mplayerplug-in (2.80), but now it works somehow.

I just moved up to FC4 from FC3 and installed the latest mplayer and 
mplayerplug-in from source code. I also installed xine from source 
code. I use both media players extensively since each has some things 
the other doesn't.

Anyway, a bit of digging around revealed that the CNN video wants to 
use the WMV 9 codec. And, I just happened to have another PC that I 
put FC4 on and installed mplayer from livna as you did. I got the same 
problem as you did on this other PC when trying to play CNN videos: 
audio, but no video.

The short story is that the livna mplayer packages do not install the 
WMV codecs you need, specifically, the wmv9dmod.dll codec.

There are a couple of ways to get the codecs you need and install them 
to the right place.

On the mplayer codecs page,

http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/codecs.html

it can be confusing which pack to get. The easiest choice is the "all" 
pack which contains all the codecs.

The livna mplayer install creates the /usr/lib/win32 but it's empty 
and that's the problem because that's where mplayer looks for the WMV 
codecs. So you can either create a symbolic link as one of the earlier 
posters described, or least copy the windows related codecs, the ones 
that start with "wm" to /usr/lib/win32.

A somewhat cleaner alternative is to grab the Xine windows codec 
package which comes in a nice rpm,

If you scroll down to the bottom of the Xine downloads page,

http://xinehq.de/index.php/releases

and click on the link cambuca...

and scroll to the bottom of that page, you can get the
w32codec package

http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/w32codec-0.52-1.i386.rpm

If you are unfamiliar with installing rpms, you can install it like 
this (as root):

rpm -ivh w32codec-0.52-1.i386.rpm

which will populate the /usr/lib/win32 directory with the codecs you need.

I installed the w32codec package on my other PC and then I could see 
and hear the CNN video with Firefox and the mplayerplug-in. Firefox 
still hangs after playing the video but at least you can watch the 
video now.

--Kenny




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