firefox plugins and mpeg and wmv support

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 11 Jul 2008, Mike Burger wrote:

> >   just yesterday, i tried to make a convert of a friend by installing
> > fedora 9 on the spare disk on her system, and she quickly learned
> > about the notion of non-free software when she tried to view online
> > mpg and wmv files, at which point i explained the notion of the GPL,
> > etc, etc.
> >
> >   we got to the concept of mozilla plugins for firefox, whereupon we
> > took a quick look under "about:plugins" and she pointed out that, as
> > far as the output of that page was concerned, there was this thing
> > called mozplugger which could handle various formats including
> > video/mpeg, and there was an "installed" WMP plugin that could handle
> > wmv files, and they were both enabled, and she said, "just from what i
> > can see here, this is supposed to be the list of installed plugins,
> > and it sure looks like those plugins are there and enabled, so why
> > don't they work so i can play mpeg and wmv files?"
> >
> >   to which, because i don't have as much familiarity with multimedia
> > under fedora as i'd like, i had to admit that i didn't know.  i hadn't
> > installed any non-free media packages yet, so i really don't know what
> > it means to look at "about:plugins" and be told that there are plugins
> > that handle those formats, and they're enabled.  thoughts?  i really
> > do need to read up on all the multimedia stuff.
>
> I've got VLC running on my F9 system.
>
> The three VLC components, in my case, are vlc-core, mozilla-vlc and
> vlc (all installed from the Livna repo).
>
> In addition, I believe I had to do a little research for the
> appropriate codecs, but once installed, I'm able to play just about
> everything via Firefox.

that's the route i took -- enable livna and

  # yum install vlc mozilla-vlc

(vlc-core is a dependency of vlc so it comes along for the ride.)

  at the moment, she's happy so i'll do extra research into codecs on
an as-needed basis.  still would be nice to have a comprehensive f9
multimedia guide.

rday
--

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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry:
    Have classroom, will lecture.

http://crashcourse.ca                          Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
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