I am running Archlinux/KDE4 on a 64-bit box. I am unsuccessfully trying to play/view this stream with Firefox3 and the MPlayer plugin:

http://www.aftenposten.no/webtv/?id=12424

If anyone around here is able to view this streaming format under Linux, I would be very interested in how you do it and, if you know, what format/codec is in use.

BTW, here is the output from an attempt at debugging:

[~]$ mplayer -vo xv http://www.aftenposten.no/webtv/?id=12424
MPlayer 1.0rc2-4.3.2 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+ (Family: 15, Model: 7, Stepping: 10)
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
115 audio & 237 video codecs
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Playing http://www.aftenposten.no/webtv/?id=12424.
Resolving www.aftenposten.no for AF_INET6...
Couldn't resolve name for AF_INET6: www.aftenposten.no
Resolving www.aftenposten.no for AF_INET...
Connecting to server www.aftenposten.no[80.91.37.210]: 80...
Cache size set to 320 KBytes
Cache fill: 1.97% (6445 bytes)


Exiting... (End of file)

***

I have looked at the various *.conf files, but I obviously don't know which settings to alter, if any...

Funny thing is that these files would play without any problem under a live distribution of Yoper that I tried last year, but I am not going to trade Arch for this issue alone...

It wouldn't play for me either. I had to disable noscript to get as far as I did. However, I just get "connected" displayed. It may be something they are doing has changed.
I'm able to view and download most web videos.

Same here - I do see "connected", and Firefox says "Done"...

I suppose I should subscribe to a MPlayer help mailing list. Wish they had an open forum.

I finally got it to play, but not through mplayer. First I used wget to grab the url of the embedded player. Then I opened up the resulting text file to find the actual stream url: mms://vod1.aftenposten.no/player/2008-12/633651325876718750.wmv.

This url crashes mplayer and vlc doesn't seem to like it either, but for some reason it plays just fine when I open it with xine (although it's extremely choppy because it constantly has to re-buffer).

I also tried saving the stream with mimms, but it fails there too, giving back a "connection error".

In any case, I'd probably lay the blame on the server rather than mplayer. There's something not quite right going on there.

Hi David,

interesting. Meanwhile I tried the latest Yoper Live distro, and Totem in this version was not able to show the stream, complaining about a missing mms URI, which I take to be a missing web interface for mms. As mentioned, a Yoper live version I tried last year had no problems showing these streams. Perhaps an indication of changes on the server side.

However, now that we know that it is somehow to do with mms, I wonder whether changing some settings in MPlayer might help...

I just realized that MPlayer does not stream from anywhere on my system, using Firefox 3.x. I have read the manual and fumbled with config files, but I simply can't get it to work with any stream.

Yes, I have deleted pluginreg.dat and logged out/in, but changes I make to ~/.mplayer/config don't seem to have any effects whatsoever...

You have to get the mplayerplug-in
You can probably download it from Archlinux

http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net/
Cheers

Thanks. I have the MPlayerplug-in, and I have also tried it with and without Firefox' own MozPlugger. MPlayerplug-in goes through the motions to start and play the stream, then stops. I noticed this morning in Firefox' "aboutlugins" that it could not find the "launcher binary", which I take to be mozplugger.so, but from what others are saying, MozPlugger is not needed for MPlayerplug-in to work...

MPlayerplug-in worked on my Archlinux system half a year ago, albeit not for the site I asked about in my first post, so I am starting to wonder if this is due to some regression in Firefox 3.x, or Arch itself...
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I have to revise the above. After removing MozPlugger and doing a reboot, I seem to be able to stream most formats from the links on this page:

http://fredrik.hubbe.net/plugger/test.html

Streaming from Aftenposten, the link/format mentioned in my first post, is still a no-no, though.