Streaming mutimedia doesn't.

Streaming mutimedia doesn't.

[Paul Furness]

Hi!

This is perhaps a bit of a general rant, but any ideas would help.

I've played with lots of combinations of Linux distros and hardware. I
currently use as my workstation a Dell precision 340 with a 1.9G P4 (I
prefer Athlons...), plenty of memory, plenty of disk etc etc. But this
problem seems to run through them all:

I just don't seem to be able to get streaming multimedia to work right.
Is there something fundamentally broken in the main Linux-compatible web
browsers (old Netscape 4.x, Mozilla 1.0, Opera) that means they don't
talk to real player? Is there something fundamentally broken in the
Linux port of real player? Is it something broken in Gnome or Sawfish
(which I use the most since I use Red hat 7.3 at the moment). Is Ximian
broken?

Or am I broken somewhere - is this a really, really obvious thing that I
haven't done somewhere?

Not just real player either - java and flash never seem to work quite
right, either.

I'm pretty fed up with downloading various different plugins that are
needed and then after installing them finding that they still don't
bloody work! In the end, I often end up running up a virtual machine
with Windows in it, and using Internet Explorer because basically it
works (God, I _hate_ saying that about MS products!!!)·

Someone tell me I'm missing something simple - I'd rather that I was
wrong (or at least need calibrating) rather than all the software being
wrong!

Paul.

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Re: Streaming mutimedia doesn't.

[James]

On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 09:35:41AM +0100, Paul Furness wrote:
| 
| I just don't seem to be able to get streaming multimedia to work right.
| Is there something fundamentally broken in the main Linux-compatible web
| browsers (old Netscape 4.x, Mozilla 1.0, Opera) that means they don't
| talk to real player? Is there something fundamentally broken in the
| Linux port of real player? Is it something broken in Gnome or Sawfish
| (which I use the most since I use Red hat 7.3 at the moment). Is Ximian
| broken?

I have never managed to get Realplayer to work inside Netscape/Mozilla,
however the client works perfectly on its own. I just downloaded it and
ran it.

Flash also works fine under Mozilla 1.0. All you have to do is download
the required files (Mozilla has a link somewhere - press the Mozilla
spinner thing on your browser) and copy the plugin into the right
location.

GNOME, Sawfish, and Ximian (which isn't a 'thing', more a group of
people) aren't anything to do with it.

The only things I can't get working are Java applets, but I've not
really been trying that hard. Adobe's PDF plugin seems to work well
though.

If you don't know, typing "about:plugins" into your Mozilla addressbar
will tell you what plugins are loaded, and if you run Mozilla from a
command prompt (XTerm, Gnome terminal, etc) you might see some errors
that could help pinpoint any problems you're having.

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Re: Streaming mutimedia doesn't.

[Paul Furness]

On Wed, 2002-09-04 at 14:47, James wrote:

> | I just don't seem to be able to get streaming multimedia to work right.
> 
> I have never managed to get Realplayer to work inside Netscape/Mozilla,
> however the client works perfectly on its own. I just downloaded it and
> ran it.
> Flash also works fine under Mozilla 1.0. All you have to do is download
> the required files (Mozilla has a link somewhere - press the Mozilla
> spinner thing on your browser) and copy the plugin into the right
> location.

Good point - I should have mentioned that Realplayer itself runs ok.
Some places on the web, I can occasionally click on a "listen to this"
button and it works. But it seems like most web sites now (certainly
lots of internet radio sites) don't put simple, old fashioned links to
the stream. I guess it's probably more to do with the browsers not
passing the information to realplayer in the correct format or
something.

Yeah, I think I got flash working ok mostly. I have to confess that I
haven't recently gone into non-working web sites in great detail - I
just got so used to about 30% of the web not working in linux that I
just went "Oh, another one not working - that'll be multimedia then."
and ignored it.

> 
> GNOME, Sawfish, and Ximian (which isn't a 'thing', more a group of
> people) aren't anything to do with it.

No, that's probably true. I was thinking in terms of maybe a mime
problem but I was clutching at straws...

> 
> The only things I can't get working are Java applets, but I've not
> really been trying that hard. Adobe's PDF plugin seems to work well
> though.

PDF is ok, but yeah, I agree that Java is really very limited. I did
install the appropriate bits, and for some Java it actually works, but
for some reason most of it either doesn't work at all, or works only
partially. I know nothing about java in web pages (it's on my list of
things to learn...) so I have no idea why some work and some don't.

> 
> If you don't know, typing "about:plugins" into your Mozilla addressbar
> will tell you what plugins are loaded, and if you run Mozilla from a
> command prompt (XTerm, Gnome terminal, etc) you might see some errors
> that could help pinpoint any problems you're having.

Thanks. Yeah, I already tried these things. I have numerous plugins, all
apparently there and working. It's just when I actually try and use them
that they often don't work right. As for the command prompt: it gives me
nothing helpful. Nothing at all, in fact. I should probably spend some
time looking for a --debug or -vv switch...

Maybe I just need to build everything from source...

P.

Re: Streaming mutimedia doesn't.

[Gary E. Miller]

Yo Paul!

On 4 Sep 2002, Paul Furness wrote:

> Date: 04 Sep 2002 09:35:41 +0100

> I just don't seem to be able to get streaming multimedia to work right.

No problems for me, I use realplayer and mplayer with Mozilla.

> Not just real player either - java and flash never seem to work quite
> right, either.

They work fine for me, but I usually turn them off to be spared the
crap.

> I'm pretty fed up with downloading various different plugins that are
> needed and then after installing them finding that they still don't
> bloody work! In the end, I often end up running up a virtual machine
> with Windows in it, and using Internet Explorer because basically it
> works (God, I _hate_ saying that about MS products!!!)·

Really?  My windows hosts crash much more often than my Linux hosts.

Mozilla seems much more tolerant to me of bad javascript and bad html
than IE 6.

> Someone tell me I'm missing something simple - I'd rather that I was
> wrong (or at least need calibrating) rather than all the software being
> wrong!

Hmm, well, I think you must be missing something.

BTW, I use Slackware, but install most of these things from the
sourceforge source rather than the munged distro versions.

RGDS
GARY
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary E. Miller Rellim 20340 Empire Blvd, Suite E-3, Bend, OR 97701
	gem@rellim.com  Tel:+1(541)382-8588 Fax: +1(541)382-8676



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Re: Streaming mutimedia doesn't.

[Paul Furness]

Hi, Gary.

On Wed, 2002-09-04 at 21:14, Gary E. Miller wrote:
> Yo Paul!
> 
> 
> > I just don't seem to be able to get streaming multimedia to work right.
> 
> No problems for me, I use realplayer and mplayer with Mozilla.

Cool. That's a start - it means that it is _possible_ to make them work,
so it's worth me trying...

> 
> > Not just real player either - java and flash never seem to work quite
> > right, either.
> 
> They work fine for me, but I usually turn them off to be spared the
> crap.
> 
Good point. :) 
It's only occasionally that they are actually useful - like on some
tech-support sites.


> > works (God, I _hate_ saying that about MS products!!!)·
> 
> Really?  My windows hosts crash much more often than my Linux hosts.
> 

Oh yeah, _windows_ crashes all the time and generally sucks. It's just
Internet Explorer that sometimes works. I guess that a lot of web pages
are written and tested only for IE.

> Mozilla seems much more tolerant to me of bad javascript and bad html
> than IE 6.

I'm not using IE6 as it's apparently not as stable as IE5. Which is
about right for anything new that MS releases...

> 
> Hmm, well, I think you must be missing something.
> 
> BTW, I use Slackware, but install most of these things from the
> sourceforge source rather than the munged distro versions.
> 
Now _that_ is a good point. I haven't tried rebuilding most of the stuff
that fails (I did try that a couple of years ago, but a lot of it didn't
compile back then and I couldn't be bothered to spend hours figuring out
why.)

I'm just about to have a go with Gnome 2, so it might be a good time to
try to recompile everything...

Thanks.

P.


-- 
Paul Furness

Systems Manager

2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2.

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Re: Streaming mutimedia doesn't.

[Gary E. Miller]

Yo Paul!

As I remember, getting mplayer up was non-trivial.  OTOH, real-player
works great out of the box with Netscape for Linux.

Gnome 2 will not really apply to these issues.

RGDS
GARY
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary E. Miller Rellim 20340 Empire Blvd, Suite E-3, Bend, OR 97701
	gem@rellim.com  Tel:+1(541)382-8588 Fax: +1(541)382-8676

On 5 Sep 2002, Paul Furness wrote:

> > BTW, I use Slackware, but install most of these things from the
> > sourceforge source rather than the munged distro versions.
> >
> Now _that_ is a good point. I haven't tried rebuilding most of the stuff
> that fails (I did try that a couple of years ago, but a lot of it didn't
> compile back then and I couldn't be bothered to spend hours figuring out
> why.)
>
> I'm just about to have a go with Gnome 2, so it might be a good time to
> try to recompile everything...