hi. i've been using linux for a little over a year. One of the few complains i'd have is that streaming media online seems to be a hit or miss. i use firefox/mplayer/mozplugger. My question is what technologies are good to know to help my experience with streaming in linux go smoother? Is there anything you can do to still view content even when it is obvious the site was designed with IE and WMP in mind? Im sure you've heard of the video4linux project. Is there any project like streaming4linux i could look into to learn more? What could i do to help the open source community with streaming or is it mainly fall on the hands of web developers? thanks for any replies in advance.

I don't care for MPlayer. The video quality is always very jerky. I'd suggested uninstalling the MPlayer plugin, then installing Kaffeine and the Kaffeine plugin. After that, you may want to also install the Firefox MediaPlayerConnectivity extension. It allows you to define what media player will handle what types of video, and then it can also give you the option of clicking on the video to launch your chosen player.

i've never had any complaints about mplayer but maybe i'll try kaffiene. The streaming i stumble over the most is urls with .asx at the end which i've heard is a WMP format.

You can also use "curl" to see where the file is sitting
That will show you where the .wma, .wmv is.
Then run the location of the file
You can also dump Mplayers stream to file so that you can view it from HD later. Which is good for streams that come and go.
http://mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html

thanks. That was exactly what i was looking for. I got this message when using mplayer to play the file

"Thank you for downloading a media file containing proprietary and patentend technology."

is that just mplayer's author(s) sense of humor?

I don't know, I thought that it was a little message from the windows media stream. IE Microsoft. I've seen that many times, don't know

then how do i get mplayer to respond "Blow me Bill Gates?"

Mplayer does produce some humorous messages, such as the ominous "Core dumped " when you use -dumpaudio.

Mplayer video output is silky smooth here - me thinks jswhite could use a better graphics card or a faster processor.