Videos

[Sundar Nagarajan]

Dean Hamilton wrote:
> I just updated Ubuntu from 8.10 to 9.10 and now cannot play any video.  
> I downloaded and re-installed Adobe Flash and Shockwave players to no 
> avail.  My machine is an AMD 64-bit self-built with a 1.6 GHz single 
> processor, 1 GB of memory and a 320 GB Hard Drive.  Videos worked fine 
> in 8.10.  Does anyone have any suggestions?

I suppose you mean you have upgraded to 9.04 (Jaunty) and not 9.10 
(Karmic Koala) which is not released yet. I moved to Jaunty 9.04 on 
AMD64 over the weekend, and have everything I need working right - 
including playing video (embedded Windows Media on web pages, DVD, 
Flash, Windows Media, M3U, OGG, Real audio streams etc).

I highly recommend the following steps especially if you are on AMD64 
(your mileage may vary):

A. Enable the third party Medibuntu repository
	Add their public key to verify signatures on their packages:
	wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | apt-key add -
	Previous command should all be on one line

	Add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list or to a new file
	in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ - make sure new filename ends in
	.list:

	deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ jaunty free non-free

B. Install libdvdcss2
	apt-get install libdvdcss2

C. Uninstall totem-mozilla (doesn't work right on AMD64, always
    "searches for plugins", but never FINDS them!).
	apt-get remove totem-mozilla

D. Install vlc mozilla-vlc-plugin
	apt-get install vlc mozilla-vlc-plugin


Everything should just work. If not, get back with what is not working.

At least on Hardy/AMD64 and Jaunty/AMD64 I have managed to play all 
Windows media / Real / OGGVorbis / MP3 / M3U audio/video streams. The 
only cases I have had problems are:
	- Stream itself is bad / unreliable (any platform)
	- Playing video embedded in firefox was flaky until Jaunty
	  I used to use MediaPlayer Connectivity extension to launch
	  xine in a separate process. In Jaunty, VLC plugin seems to
	  work OK (functional at least, including fullscreen).
	- Realaudio streams sometimes point at SMIL files which need
	  to be parsed as SGML to extract RTSP streams. mplayer used
	  to barf on these although it is perfectly capable of playing
	  the RTSP stream once identified. VLC now does this fine
	- Xine / mplayer used to fail to parse ASF files (again
	  XML/SGML). Once you can parse the ASF file and identify the
	  MMS stream, mplayer / xine used to play them FINE. Again, VLC
	  now does all this transparently.
	- xine used to barf on M3U streams/files without a terminating
	  CR (IMHO definitely a xine bug). I had a simple wrapper that
	  would check an M3U and add a CR at the end if required. Don't
	  know if VLC fixes this problem too.

Some areas which I have NOT explored much is playing Quicktime (online), 
divx (embedded / local files). If you face a problem in this area, if 
you point at specific filetypes / mimetypes / URLs which don't work, I 
may be able to investigate and help.

I would like to repeat, at least from my past experience on Hardy/AMD64 
and in Jaunty/AMD64, you DO NOT NEED to manually install ANY codecs - 
including w32codecs, w64codecs etc. There are a lot of messages on 
forums recommending one or more of the following:
	- Install mplayer /vlc/mplayer and firefox in an i386 chroot
	- Install w32codecs / w64codecs
	- Copy over DLL files from Windows (!)
	etc.....

None of the above issues / associated hacks relate to CODECS per se. 
Codecs are used to process the media stream itself. Most of the problems 
  related to embedding in firefox, or parsing SGML/XML file formats.


Sundar Nagarajan