[K12OSN] united streaming and mplayerplug-in: recipe

William Fragakis william at fragakis.com
Tue Mar 13 17:47:35 UTC 2007


Hello all,
I hope this isn't redundant - the last posts on the issue had videos
played from saved files via mplayer or other players.

I've gotten mplayerplug-in to work with unitedstreaming.com and cnn.com
videos within firefox (.wmv format). I've used this only in K12ltsp ver.
6, ymmv. It does work in the classroom as I've updated a couple of
servers plus my own home server without problem.

steps (as root):
1) install mplayer and mplayerplug-in from livna
(if you are updating mplayer and you get a conflict with ffmpeg, remove
ffmpeg and mplayer and reinstall mplayer)

2) create the directory /usr/lib/win32 - the default permissions 755
(iirc) are fine
download the codecs for various formats from
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html 
under "binary codecs"

You will be downloading essential-20061022.tar.bz2

Extract the codecs and move them into /usr/lib/win32 and give them the
same permissions as the directory (if they didn't by default)
mandatory disclaimer: the codecs are subject to certain licensing
restrictions in certain countries, blah, blah.

3) edit /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf
under the audio section 

# Specify default audio driver (see -ao help for a list).
#ao = alsa

# Use SDL audio driver with the esd subdriver by default.
ao = sdl:esd

(ie comment out alsa as the default and uncomment sdl:esd)

4) drumroll - the part that was giving us all fits: no sound in
mplayerplug-in

edit /etc/mplayerplug-in.conf

uncomment the ao line and change it to either (they both seem to work)

ao=sdl:esd

or 

ao=sdl


5) Annoyingly, if you open the config panel of mplayer plugin from the
browser window (right clicking), it will show oss as the audio output.
Ignore it. That may be correctable in the source code but I haven't
looked at it yet.

6) Optional: if you are getting "couldn't resolve name for af_inet6"
errors in mplayer, add the following line to /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf

prefer-ipv4 = yes

(thanks:
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2006-May/060636.html)

7) ignore plugiin warnings on cnn.com, click "continue, etc."

Enjoy,
William Fragakis
morrisbrandon.com










More information about the K12OSN mailing list