Firefox Playing MP3 Online Issue
 

Greetings

Thank you in advance for your assistance. I have an interesting issue trying to play online music samples in MP3 format using the Firefox web browser and Mplayer plugin. I am using SuSe 10 (Novell). I had uninstalled all the multimedia programs that came with the distro from Novell and installed Multimedia players and codecs from the Guru and Packman repositories through YAST. I can play MP3's using Amarok from my hard drive and CD's. All the video multi media work fine through Firefox as do WMA and Real Player audio formats. However, when I try to play an MP3, one of two things happen; Either the Mplayin plugin hangs at 99% download and never starts playing the MP3 or the download progress display runs very fast, gives a quick flash of color and then the message "Stopped" appears. Same MP3 link works fine in Konqueror.

I can play MP3's on my hard drive with mplayer from the console by typing mplayer Test.MP3.

I have checked about:Plugins in Firefox and it lists the Mplayer plugin there and lists it as enabled. Here are the plugins I have installed in Firefox:

Java 1.5.0
Adobe 7.0
Google VLC multimedia plugin 1.0
Quicktime plugin 6.0
Windows media player
mplayerplug-in 3.21
gxine starter plugin
Default plugin
KDE Parts Plugin
Kaffeine Starter plugin
Shockwave Flash 7.0

I also checked to make sure that the mplayerplugin.so is in the plugin directory and the .xpt is in the components directory.

Here are two example links where I have the issue playing MP3 online.

Link#1
Janet macklin Homepage
http://www.janetmacklin.com/05_Corco...e_Silence_.mp3


Link#2
World Records
http://www.renbrown.addr.com/cgi-bin...MODERN+RECORDS



Anyone have an experience like this? Suggestions for a fix would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
Alphasiderius

I can confirm this. Neither link plays for me either. The first one downloads but refuses to play, and the second plays only about 1/4 of a second. I can take the urls from both and stream them in xmms just fine though. I know I've had problems with this myself in the past also.

I guess is that it's a bug in either the mplayer plugin, the Firefox plugin system, or a combo of both.

To work around it, go to your Firefox preferences >> downloads >> view and edit actions and change the association for MPGA to open in mplayer (or whatever app you want to use) externally. That should work for direct links, but not for embedded streams like in your second example. For those, the mplayer plugin has a right-click option to copy the url, which you can then manually open up in your application. You can also sometimes get the actual url from page info>media or directly from the page source.

same problem here :mad:

the mplayer plugin used to work fine, but the problems you described started recently, it may be related to the switch to firefox 1.5. videos from sites like putfile.com have the same problem.

on a related note - anyone know why the right click "save as" plugin player option works for .asf files, but not .wmv files??

In my logs for mplayerplug-in. It shows that it thinks its a DV Sony Video which it is not. By playing it through mplayer, it does work. Try using plugger to play only sound files.

This problem has been fixed in CVS of mplayerplug-in as of 3/21/06. I would have fixed it earlier if I had been aware of the problem. The root cause of the problem was that the temporary file did not have an mp3 extension and so mplayer was not identifing it correctly. A simple change to the code fixed this problem and now mplayer plays it properly.

Both links in the OP play for me with no problem.

PCLinuxOS
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060201 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Plugins (14):

* Adobe Reader 7.0
* Default Plugin
* Demo Print Plugin for unix/linux
* DjVuLibre-3.5.14
* Google VLC multimedia plugin 1.0
* Helix DNA Plugin: RealPlayer G2 Plug-In Compatible
* Java(TM) Plug-in 1.5.0_06-b05
* MozPlugger 1.7.3 handles QuickTime Windows Media Player Plugin
* OpenOffice.org Plug-in
* QuickTime Plug-in 6.0
* Scalable Vector Graphics
* Shockwave Flash
* Windows Media Player Plugin
* mplayerplug-in 3.15