Totem setup ??

[Amadeus W. M.]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006 00:34:45 -0500, William Case wrote:

> Thanks Steven and Tim;
> 
> As I have said, anything to do with pictures, video, audio or sound is
> not my strong suit.
> 
> On Thu, 2006-11-23 at 23:00 -0600, Steven Stern wrote:
>> William Case wrote:
>> >
>> > 
>> 
>> That plays on my system using mplayerplug-in
>> 
> If I am to download mplayer, could some one give me a quick explanation
> why I am doing that, why doesn't totem and gstreamer do the same thing,
> and where is the safest place (i.e. repos) to get it?  Does it
> self-install as a plugin or do I have to configure? 
> -- 
> Regards Bill
>

mplayer was around a little before gstreamer, I think, and people were
excited it could play just about media format under the sun, and you could
also compress dvds to avi/mpg to fit on a cd. Some people view it as the
swiss army knife of multimedia (although there's also transcode).

Though open source, it (or parts of it) has a license incompatible to gpl,
that's why it is not shipped standard with fedora. It can be downloaded
from livna:

http://rpm.livna.org

You have to have the livna repository enabled. Once you do, just type as
root

yum install mplayer

and you have it. 

Gstreamer is a good initiative to use/rewrite only GPL (or compatible)
multimedia libraries, and, of course, is supposed to be able to play
anything mplayer can play, or any other multimedia program, for that
matter. 

One point of contention (someone correct me if I'm wrong) is the ffmpeg
library which both mplayer and gstreamer use, and contains the codecs we
need the most. The gstreamer plugins shipped with FC do not contain the
ffmpeg codecs. To have totem/gstreamer play anything other than flac or
ogg files, you have to install gstreamer-ffmpeg from livna as well. If you
have the livna repo enabled, as root do

yum list | grep gstreamer

and you'll see all the plugins, including gstreamer-ffmpeg.



mplayer can do some nifty things. For instance, if you use the
-user-agent flag in mplayer, you can pretend to be the windows mplayer (if
you know the proper identification string). This MAY fool some sites that
refuse to play any media file if you don't have the windows player.
You can also dump a stream (mplayer -dumpstream) from sites that try
to prevent users from downloading a file by hiding the url of the file
within a script. To get the actual url, you first play the file
(online) the way they want you to, but while it's playing, do a 

ps auxfwww | grep mplayer

You will see something like

 mplayer -wid 0x4208924 -vf scale=468:-3 -osdlevel 0 -nojoystick -noconsolecontrols -cookies -slave -user-agent NSPlayer -nomouseinput -cache 512 mms://wmscnn.stream.aol.com.edgestreams.net/cnn/business/2006/11/24/velshi.cause.related.market.cnn.ws.wmv

There you can see the actual url, so you can then simply do 

mplayer -dumpstream mms://....    


and there you have it. Either that, or you look in /tmp.


If you want to really get into the details of mplayer and gstreamer you
should subscribe to the appropriate mailing lists, these questions will be
better answered there. The gstreamer list is friendly.