On Fri, 24 Nov 2006 00:34:45 -0500, William Case wrote: > Thanks Steven and Tim; > > As I have said, anything to do with pictures, video, audio or sound is > not my strong suit. > > On Thu, 2006-11-23 at 23:00 -0600, Steven Stern wrote: >> William Case wrote: >> > >> > >> >> That plays on my system using mplayerplug-in >> > If I am to download mplayer, could some one give me a quick explanation > why I am doing that, why doesn't totem and gstreamer do the same thing, > and where is the safest place (i.e. repos) to get it? Does it > self-install as a plugin or do I have to configure? > -- > Regards Bill > mplayer was around a little before gstreamer, I think, and people were excited it could play just about media format under the sun, and you could also compress dvds to avi/mpg to fit on a cd. Some people view it as the swiss army knife of multimedia (although there's also transcode). Though open source, it (or parts of it) has a license incompatible to gpl, that's why it is not shipped standard with fedora. It can be downloaded from livna: http://rpm.livna.org You have to have the livna repository enabled. Once you do, just type as root yum install mplayer and you have it. Gstreamer is a good initiative to use/rewrite only GPL (or compatible) multimedia libraries, and, of course, is supposed to be able to play anything mplayer can play, or any other multimedia program, for that matter. One point of contention (someone correct me if I'm wrong) is the ffmpeg library which both mplayer and gstreamer use, and contains the codecs we need the most. The gstreamer plugins shipped with FC do not contain the ffmpeg codecs. To have totem/gstreamer play anything other than flac or ogg files, you have to install gstreamer-ffmpeg from livna as well. If you have the livna repo enabled, as root do yum list | grep gstreamer and you'll see all the plugins, including gstreamer-ffmpeg. mplayer can do some nifty things. For instance, if you use the -user-agent flag in mplayer, you can pretend to be the windows mplayer (if you know the proper identification string). This MAY fool some sites that refuse to play any media file if you don't have the windows player. You can also dump a stream (mplayer -dumpstream) from sites that try to prevent users from downloading a file by hiding the url of the file within a script. To get the actual url, you first play the file (online) the way they want you to, but while it's playing, do a ps auxfwww | grep mplayer You will see something like mplayer -wid 0x4208924 -vf scale=468:-3 -osdlevel 0 -nojoystick -noconsolecontrols -cookies -slave -user-agent NSPlayer -nomouseinput -cache 512 mms://wmscnn.stream.aol.com.edgestreams.net/cnn/business/2006/11/24/velshi.cause.related.market.cnn.ws.wmv There you can see the actual url, so you can then simply do mplayer -dumpstream mms://.... and there you have it. Either that, or you look in /tmp. If you want to really get into the details of mplayer and gstreamer you should subscribe to the appropriate mailing lists, these questions will be better answered there. The gstreamer list is friendly.
