Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Video Plugins for Firefox under Fedora 10

The most important video player/library under linux are Gstreamer, Xine, Mplayer and VLC.
The first two are plug-in based, while the last two are "all-in-one" solutions.

Many of the packages that you need to see the most common proprietary video formats aren't in the standard Fedora repository, therefore you have to add RPMFusion

Of course to see videos in Firefox you need a plugin. To see the videos at http://tv.repubblica.it I've tried all these plugins:
  1. xine-plugin: It couldn't recognise the format and came the message "Format x-ms-asf unknown"
  2. mplayerplug-in: It isn't in RPMFusion but in ATrpms. These two repositories aren't compatible and it's better to not enable them together. Personally I prefer RPMFusion because there the packages are more stable. Anyway with this plugin I could see the video stream but in other sites firefox crashed. It was quite unstable.
  3. mozilla-vlc: I coudn't see anything, maybe I hadn't VLC complete installed.
  4. totem-mozplugin: Totem is the standard player for Gnome. At the beginning I coudn't see anything, but after installing mit yum gstreamer-plugins* and gstreamer-ffmpeg it worked perfectly. It appears also to be very stable and it's the plugin that I'm now currently using.
With the totem-mozplugin I tried then to see a video on http://www.rai.tv: after a short advertising clip the reproduction was interrupted. I clicked with the mouse right button on the video frame and copied the video source URL. I was able to reproduce it with mplayer but not with totem.

No comments: