firefox plugins and mpeg and wmv support

[Robert P. J. Day]

  just yesterday, i tried to make a convert of a friend by installing
fedora 9 on the spare disk on her system, and she quickly learned
about the notion of non-free software when she tried to view online
mpg and wmv files, at which point i explained the notion of the GPL,
etc, etc.

  we got to the concept of mozilla plugins for firefox, whereupon we
took a quick look under "about:plugins" and she pointed out that, as
far as the output of that page was concerned, there was this thing
called mozplugger which could handle various formats including
video/mpeg, and there was an "installed" WMP plugin that could handle
wmv files, and they were both enabled, and she said, "just from what i
can see here, this is supposed to be the list of installed plugins,
and it sure looks like those plugins are there and enabled, so why
don't they work so i can play mpeg and wmv files?"

  to which, because i don't have as much familiarity with multimedia
under fedora as i'd like, i had to admit that i didn't know.  i hadn't
installed any non-free media packages yet, so i really don't know what
it means to look at "about:plugins" and be told that there are plugins
that handle those formats, and they're enabled.  thoughts?  i really
do need to read up on all the multimedia stuff.

rday
--

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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry:
    Have classroom, will lecture.

http://crashcourse.ca                          Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
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