Totem grabs 1st place for Firefox plugins on FC6 after updates

Nigel Henry cave.dnb at tiscali.fr
Sun Apr 22 15:31:22 UTC 2007


This is hilarious. I installed FC6 a couple of weeks ago from cdroms that 
someone kindly sent me. Yums ok, but I don't get on with yumex, so I 
installed apt, and synaptic using yum. On FC5 on this machine I'd had 
problems with xorg, and the r128 driver for the Rage card. This was a bug on 
xorg 7.0, and I had to use the vesa driver on FC5. Mplayer wouldn't work with 
this driver on FC5 on this machine.

So. I install Mplayer, and Mplayerplug-in from Freshrpms on FC6. Mplayer plays 
my DVD's fine, so that's one problem fixed. Just for kicks I try Internet 
radio from http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4, and even though mplayerplug-in is 
only using version 9 of the realplayer, this works ok. So far so good.

Prior to installing mplayer,etc, I'd run an apt-get update, and an apt-get 
dist-upgrade. There were more than 700MB of updates, and as I'm on dialup I 
installed Mplayer, etc first, so as to see if the r128 problem had been 
fixed.

Now I go for the updates. I get 9+hours at a time on my dialup connection, so 
this equates to 5x9hr overnight sessions. 5 days later, with all the updates 
installed I think that all is ok. Next day I boot up FC6. I want to check out 
NTP, but also listen to book of the week on radio4. So I start Firefox, go to 
the bbc's site to listen to book of the week. This had worked ok before the 
updates, but now I get a message from Totem saying RTSP streams cannot be 
played yet. 

Going to about:plugins in Firefox I see 5 plugins (totem ones) have been 
added, and totem wants to take first place on the plugins list. I have 
plugins in Firefox to listen to audio streams from the BBC using realplayer, 
and quite why totem has jumped in first, trying to play a stream that it 
can't play is anybodies guess.

The fix was simple, but the heavy handed approach. Go 
to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, and rename the darned things adding a .bak to 
5x.so's, and 5x.xpt's.

In a way it was quite funny, but why totem should grab first place when it 
detects some sort of stream in the URL, and when it doesn't have a hope in 
hell of playing it, I don't know. The same goes for kaboodle, which IIRC when 
I've clicked on a file in a webbrowser, has never been able to play anything.

All makes life interesting I suppose. At least I could listen to book of the 
week, using the listen again option on the BBC's radioplayer.

Nigel.




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