I'm using Fedora Core 1 and found Eric Raymond's at multimedia how-to for Fedora.

Basically, he goes through how to install various multimedia software that for legal or other reasons is not available with the regular Fedora install.

Then he gives links for 5 tests of streaming audio/video. Later in the how-to he notes that some things did not work for him, apparently due to broken packages. My experience was that several seemed to start but not work completely, most didn't work at all. The Real and MPEG I can play but not streaming in a browser, just with a stand alone player.

Here are the links to test pages:

avi test
quicktime test
windows media
MPEG
Real

So, who out there has these things working? Do these tests work for you and, if so, what distro/applications are you using? Did you have to do a lot of special setup?

I have it working through Firefox using the Mplayer plugin. If you're using Mozilla, Epiphany, Galeon, Firefox, and probably other Linux browsers, just get the Mplayer plugin and then make a sym link to it in /usr/lib/nsbrowser/plugins. For real media you'll need the Linux version of realplayer. I hope this helps you out.

is from rmp.livna.org:

rpm -qa|grep mplay gives:
mplayerplug-in-2.11-0.lvn.2.1
mplayer-1.0-0.lvn.0.4.pre3.1
mplayer-gui-1.0-0.lvn.0.4.pre3.1
mplayer-fonts-1.1-0.lvn.3.1

If I do help -> About Plugins I get

MPlayer Plug-in supports QuickTime Plug-in 6.0 and Windows Media Player Plugin
File name: mplayerplug-in.so
mplayerplug-in 2.11

In fact it starts to play in several of the tests, but something doesn't work right.

Invoked from command line I get "MPlayer 1.0pre3-3.3.2 (C) 2000-2003 MPlayer Team".
Gentoo is quite different from Fedora, but what version of mplayer do you have? Might be time to try installing from source.

Raymond's article also mentions gxine, but while I've used Xine I've never used the plugin.

I'm using mplayer version 0.92-3.3.2 and some version of the plugin. lol What problems are you having with it exactly?

If I do the avi test link above I get an empty window with a "puzzle piece" symbol which, when clicked, tells me that I need an appropriate plug-in to play it.

BTW, this with Mozilla 1.6. I've tried Konqueror, with more or less similar results.

If I try the Quicktime test I get the mplayer logo in a window, but no Quicktime logo. I clicked next, then for maybe 30 seconds the load average on my PC got so high as to almost freeze it. Finally got to a shell and find that there are several new defunct MPlayer processes.

The Windows Media test link shows a window with garbled text, eventually a brief picture, but no sound--so maybe semi-successful. Just tested on a Win2k box with IE (gag) and yep, the picture that I saw is what it should do, but also with sound, which I didn't get.

When I try the MPEG link tests, if I try audio, I get a window with MPlayer trying to play, but nothing happens. If I try video it wants to either save the file or ask for an application to open it with. I can do that, but either the plug-in didn't register itself or doesn't work for this file type.

The Realplayer test: I can play at least some realplayer things with both Real Player and the Helix player, but when I try the test I see the controls, but no sound. In other words, I can play stuff but not with a plug-in.

I've done the things to enable java and flash and other such things often. I've installed players also, but I've played with these things enough, mostly but not exclusively with Red Hat/Fedora versions. I'm not above tinkering with stuff, and have even played with Linux from Scratch a couple of times. But that's for learning; at some point for your main desktop you want to start with something that just works, or at least can be made to do so in a reasonably straight-forward way.