Dear forum,
my media player is not functioning properly: There are some videos on the web that I simply cannot watch. There is no problems with for instance youtube.com, but I experience problems when I try to watch movies in Realplayer-format, Quicktime-format and probably other formats too. Some times my browser just crashes at the attempt.

I have installed VLC which I can understand is a media player, and as far as I can see in my Synaptics Package Manager (a graphical representation of the apt-get) I have also installed the plugin for the browser, namely the mozilla-plugin-vlc. However, my browser still tries to use its default media player, which is Totem.

Info:
Distribution: debian 2.6.18-6-686
Browser: Iceweasel 2.0.0.16

Any solutions?

Kindly,
Jakob Sundbol

Hey Jakob, I use firefox and I had a similar problem for a while until I installed the m-player plugin from my repository. That fixed the problem. Hope that helps......

You may need to uninstall the totem plug-in first before an other one will take over.

Thank you for your replies.
When I try to uninstall Totem, my Synaptic tells me that Gnome will be uninstalled as well, and as I use the Gnome Desktop or Gnome skin/layer (whatever it's called) I didn't proceed. The same happens when I try to uninstall the totem-plugin.

I have also tried to install mplayer, but it makes no differene: Even though I have installed mplayer and the mplayer-plugin, Iceweasel still uses Totem in (trying to) open the videos. I have also tried to edit the Preferences in Iceweasel and to define, that "Movie Player" is to be used instead of any other video player when dealing with for instance .wmv-files.

The videos which is troublesome is in the .wmv-format (as far as I can tell) and was for instance located at http://www.dr.dk/NETTV/Update/2008/11/23/154909.htm

Any ideas as how to proceed?

Kind regards
Jakob Sundbøl

OK, two things:
- Totem should be able to read most media formats; if yours fails, it is more than likely a matter of not having access to the required codecs. Make sure to install the gstreamer plug-ins (especially gstreamer-ffmpeg); you also need to set up the Debian multimedia repository, which contains many non-free codecs.
- Are you sure you uninstalled mozilla-totem? If yes, then you may need to go into /usr/lib/firefox/plugins and remove it manually (I suggest you do not delete it, just move it out of the way) and then install the mplayer plug-in. Of course, there is no need to do this unless you are sure you do no want to use the totem plug-in.

Hello again,
as I have uninstalled debian and replaced it with ubuntu (and replaced the Iceweasel with Firefox), my question is no longer relevant.

Thank you to jay73 and timeth for your replies.

Kind regards
Jakob Sundbøl

Strange - that stream works w/o problems for me with sid and xineplugin that's supposed to be junk.