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
