Video players, plugins, Firefox and 64 bit

[Tom Horsley]

On Fri, 3 Aug 2007 00:59:08 +0100
"John Lagrue" <jlagrue at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't have a problem with Flash. nspluginwrapper works a treat. I
> just can't get ***ing video working from the BBC site.

Well, I've just done some experimenting with BBC videos
and found they seem to have hired the same butt-heads that
CNN did to revamp their video web support.

I did eventually get at least one video to play, but it
wasn't easy. Running 32 bit firefox I did this:

1. I have to have the user agent switcher plugin in
firefox so I can lie to their web server and claim to
be netscape. Without that, all I get are 403 Forbidden
messages.

2. After that, I was finally able to get through to their
web site, and after a bit of experimentation in the
video preferences page I get I picked "standard" speed
and "real player" over windows media.

3. That finally gets me to what claims to be a media
player, but no media ever plays, however if I right click
in the black video window, I get an option "play with kplayer",
and if I pick that, I get a new kplayer window and the video
actually plays!

P.S. I already have installed on my system just about
every media player and multi-media support rpm from
the livna repo, as well as all the misc windows codecs
in the /usr/lib/codecs location mplayer will look for them.
No doubt some of that stuff contributes to my ability
to finally play the video, but I have no idea exactly
which bit might be involved.