Aaron Konstam wrote:
So a mystery still exists. Why does the plugin for video and audio/video
streams go to RealPlayer 9 when it is the Realplayer 10 plugins that are
installed. It is a mystery.
The realplayer plugin appears to wrap the realplay binary,
so the player you get is the one that opens if you enter
realplay at the command prompt. This means that it won't
work if realplay isn't in your PATH environement variable.
The name Firefox reports is the name reported by the plugin,
chosen by the plugin writer. I actually still have the helix
version (nphelix.so) in ~/.mozilla/plugins, and about:plugins
tells me:
File name: nphelix.so
Helix DNA Plugin: RealPlayer G2 Plug-In Compatible version
0.4.0.622 built with gcc 3.2.0 on Jul 18 2006
There's no hxplay binary on this machine though, so it
runs realplay instead. If you run strings on the plugin
object file you will be able to see (among other things):
The mimetype and description it handles eg
audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin:rpm:RealPlayer Plugin Metafile;
The name it reports to firefox (Note that the version string
is referring to variables stored elsewhere):
Helix DNA Plugin: RealPlayer G2 Plug-In Compatible
%s version %s built with gcc %d.%d.%d on %s
realplay (and hxplay in my case).
Anyway, my plugin setup on FC6 is this:
Both the totem and mplayerplug-in are installed, however to
avoid totem treading on mplayer's toes and mplayer interfering
with the realplayer plugin I've done the following:
1. moved /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-complex-plugin.so
to
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-complex-plugin.so.bak
Similarly for libtotem-complex-plugin.xpt
2. I had moved /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/mplayerplug-in-rm.so
to
usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/mplayerplug-in-rm.so.bak
A new update seems to have reversed this, but it hasn't
registered with FF again, possibly because realplay is
already handling the media type
3. Get the codecs package from the mplayer website and put
the contents in /usr/lib/codecs (or /usr/local/lib/codecs,
can't remember which works for FC6, and I linked one to the
other)
Finally, looking at about:plugins you can see that they register
mimetypes and extensions. AFAICT Firefox uses the mimetype it
gets from the server to decide which plugin to use. If you try
to load a local file, or the server is badly set up, it has to
guess the mimetype.
I can trick Firefox into trying to use the realplayer plugin on
a local file by putting
'type=audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin desc="Realplayer" exts="rm"'
in ~/.mime-types
If this file doesn't exist, mine looks like this after that change:
#--Netscape Communications Corporation MIME Information
#Do not delete the above line. It is used to identify the file type.
#mime types added by Netscape Helper
type=application/x-java-jnlp-file desc="Java Web Start" exts="jnlp"
#
type=audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin desc="Realplayer" exts="rm"
(See also /etc/mime.types, but best not to edit it)
Needless to say this will only work at all reliably if the plugin
expects the filetype you are trying to get it to view. Once again
though; this shouldn't be necessary when trying to view something
from a webpage and a local file is probably better used with a
stand-alone viewer.
--
imalone
