When trying to watch a music video on Yahoo.com or MTV.com the video doesn't show, it tells me to download Windows Media Player 9 for it to work. It plays WMV. Is there a way that I can watch these videos without using Windows?


Cliffnotes:
I have RealPlayer 10 installed
I have Mplayer installed
Using Firefox 1.0.1
Not just music videos, other streaming videos on websites.

Are you still have problems with the video playbacks, I believe I can find the package that will allow you to play all media formats.

Let me know if you need it.

I have had this same problem with MTV and other sites, even using the mplayer and xine mozilla plugins didn't solve my problem.

You need to download all the codecs for all the players, if some of them are missing or not installed correctly you will receive numerous errors.

I have this problem too with xine. I have installed the rpm w32codec-0.52-1 which allows me to play the video, but most of the time, I can't get any audio. I don't really care so much about a plugin to view it within Firefox. I just configure it to open those types of files with xine.

Any help would be great. Particularly, a link to a site that has these packages and the actual name of the ones I'd need. Thanks in advance.

Even if you have all the win32 codecs, some sites still insist that you can't play windows media files and to download windows media player.

One solution is to look at the source html for the page and see where the video hyperlink is pointing. You can also use "curl" to find out where a streaming file is sitting. If it is a java window pop up then look at the source for that window. Look at the man page for "curl"

Once you find it use "wget" or "kget" or whatever you use to download the file. Then just use mplayer to open it. This works if it is just a .wmv, .rm, .mov sitting on a server.

Now wget or kget or other dl managers don't support rtsp: mms: or pnm: protocols, for that you can capture the file with mplayer
For example:

mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile NameIt.rm rtsp://blah.org/blah/blah:1020/videofile.rm

Read the man page for mplayer.

This assumes that you have mplayer and all the codecs installed correctly.

Enjoy.

You might let the web site admin know that you are unhappy about them coding only for windows. The more we speak the more they know that we are here.

I have not tried because myt laptop is out of space so I can not install any new programs. You might be able to install wine then download windows meadia player and install it under wine at least untill a better solution comes along.

Barry

That sounds like a good idea, I will look into it and post my results.

My Mplayer works fine playing WMV files but my question is, is there a way to get the movie to play on pop up window.

If you mean playing it within a pop up window within Firefox or Mozilla, then you can install the mozilla mplayer plugin. Check out http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net/ if this is what you mean.

I cannot agree with Dubya more. The Mplayerplug-In is the single best multimedia plugin for linux out today. It is the Windows Media Player plugin from windows on steroids. I highly recommed this being the first thing you install after Mplayer is setup.

Thanks alot, you guys are the bestest of help