Claude Jones wrote:
On Sat September 9 2006 8:20 am, Claude Jones wrote:
I've theorized about different packaging of
mplayer/mplayerplug-in being the culprit, and have tried both
the Livna, the ones from the mplayerplug-in website, and one's
from Blag.
Ironically, I footnote the point made above, by an experience I
had just after sending that post. I tried a CNN video at that
moment, and it completely stalled after opening the player
window; all the flash stuff appeared, the messages about
accessing the file appeared, it appeared to connect and the play
window turned black as if it was going to play - then,
nothing... When I tried to close the window, Firefox completely
closed down. I checked my updates moments later after repeating
this behavior a second time. I had mplayer locked (I use Smart
which allows you to lock packages from being updated), but there
was a Livna package available. I unlocked mplayer and installed
the latest Livna package. After a reboot for other reasons, the
same CNN file played almost immediately.
The best way I know of to diagnose mplayerplug-in problems is to
capture the URL of the video you are trying to play and try to play it
from the command line with mplayer. The mplayerplug-in just calls
mplayer with some specific options which you can see if you list all
processes (ps aux) while the video is trying to play.
Once you have the URL, trying to play it from the command line with
mplayer will show you any problems it finds. It may help to run
mplayer in verbose mode (-v). One of the most common problems is the
cache size setting.
Also, if you right-click on the mplayerplug-in window itself, you
might check the settings under "Configure".
Here's a CNN video you can try from today's Shuttle launch:
mplayer -cache 512
mms://wmscnn.stream.aol.com.edgestreams.net/cnn/tech/2006/09/09/vo.shuttle.launch.nasa.ws.wmv
--Kenny
