Mplayer Frustrations - Getting Closer

[Raman Gupta]

>> So I'm still at square 1 1/2.  But thanks for trying!  :-)
>>
> I'm not giving up that easily.  What I did to figure out what codec the
> CNN videos wanted was copy down that URL you see when you get the audio
> but no video, and run it from a command line like this,
> 
> mplayer
> mms://wmscnn.stream.aol.com/cnn/nitn/2005/07/08/nitn.edition.12.cnn.ws.wmv
> 
> If you run that command (it's one line) in a terminal, it will show you
> what codec it's trying to use and whether it finds it. Could you try
> running that and posting the output?

As a follow-on to this wonderful debug method, I found that, by default,
my mplayer, with CNN feeds, had the same problem you described earlier
i.e. that I got sound but not video.

If you run "mplayer -vo help" it will list the video output driver
choices available.  Try various ones -- I found that "mplayer -vo x11
..." worked for me.

If that works, then the next step is to set that output driver as the
default. Adding "vo=whatever" to your ~/.mplayer/config file should do
it.  Haven't tried it yet, but that should fix it for the plugin too.

Cheers,
Raman