Hey everyone, I just spent all night trying to use mlb.com's streaming video service on my Slackware box with not very much luck. They offer streams in both Real and Windows Media format, so I thought it was a fairly safe bet. I was able to get the Windows Media streams to play by using Crossover Plugin with Windows Media Player 6.4. However, the video was very choppy and it was not worth watching. I have gotten WMV streams to work in the past with Crossover, but it rarely works very well. I know that you can get Xine to play WMV files, so I downloaded the win32 codecs, but the gxine mozilla plugin that I have doesn't seem to associate itself with Windows Media. Next I tried the Real Video stream. In the past I have usually had good luck with RealPlayer 8 under linux, but not this time. First I tried Helix Player M2.2. After some time troubleshooting I was fineally able to get the plugin to load, but it wouldn't play the video. It just sits there. OK, I've never had a good experience with Helix so I downloaded RealPlayer 8. This also took some troubleshooting in order to get the plugin to load in Mozilla and actually play the stream. When used with Mozilla, it starts off working flawlessly, but after a few minutes the plugin window goes blank, and mozilla usually crashes at this point. In Epiphany I can see the plugin in about:plugins, but when I go to the site it tries to send my the the plugins download page. In Konqueror, the Real plugin doesn't seem to work at all. I also tried the gxine plugin which I was able to get to play real files by pointing it to the the RealPlayer 8 codecs directory (with the rv9 codec installed). This also starts off working well, but after a couple of minutes the audio gets all scrambled and it doesn't correct itself. Also, gxine crashes whenever I try to go to full screen mode. I was also able to get totem working to some extent. For some reason when I have the RealPlayer 8 plugin installed with Mozilla, it launches totem as well. Totem doesn't have the same full screen problem that gxine suffers from, but it does have the same audio problem. I think my next step will be to try the mplayer mozilla plugin, but am I missing something better here? This seems a little rediculous to me. What are other peoples experiences with these types of media?
Sorry for the long rant, Jesse _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
