Help for a Linux Newbie With Video (Edubuntu - Edgy Edge)

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Wed, 07 Mar 2007, Mike Camden wrote:

> We use Discovery's United Streaming in our school.  United Streaming
> allows for the viewing of its many videos in either Windows Media .asf
> format or Quicktime format.  

As others have mentioned, these are both (at least partially) proprietary
formats, though with the correct extra codecs installed you generally can
play them. 

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

> I have tried installing the mplayer and its associated Mozilla plug-in to
> no avail.

To get mplayer to play them you probably need the w32codecs package which
is detailed here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/WindowsCodecs

In my experience, mplayer is one of the most reliable players, although not
the most user-friendly.  Installing gmplayer gives you mplayer with a menu
added to it.  VLC is also a nice, reliable media player and is available
for windows, linux and mac.

> If I use the default GStreamer, I can't get any videos to play.  Without
> using the "ugly" plug-in, I get an error that Totem can't play the
> Windows Media 9 files without the proper plug-in.  If I apply the
> gstreamer "ugly" codec, the movie will appear to play, and I get audio,
> but I can't get video.  Quicktime files also do not work when using
> gstreamer.

You've already gone some distance adding the codecs for gstreamer.  This
_should_ work though I must admit I've never been that impressed by
gstreamer's video playing capabilities.

For this reason, I frequently install the totem-xine engine which
automatically removes the totem-gstreamer engine (these conflict).  This is
reversible so if you install totem-gstreamer afterward, totem-xine will be
removed.  That would definitely be worth a try as the xine engine always
seems more reliable to me.

> If I install Xine (as well as the Xine media codec plug-in), my Firefox
> defaults to using Totem with Xine.  If I do this some.asf videos will
> play, but they have a ton of corruption in the playback.  Some Quicktime
> videos will also play, but they too have corruption  (negative colors,
> embossing, a lot of severe tearing, what appears to be pretty bad
> compression errors).  

This is very strange.  As someone else said, it might not be ideal but it
might work better to not have the firefox totem plugin.  That way,
files will download and the totem will launch standalone instead of working
within firefox.

> I have tried this on three separate computers 

I presume you've directly installed ubuntu on those computers -- ie you're
not using a thin client.  Video playback will probably not work well on
thin clients.

> This is the first time I've dipped my toe in the Linux waters; it's been
> a while since something computer-related has left me feeling this
> ignorant.  I've selected so many different options within the Add/Remove
> and Synaptics package managers, that I'm wondering if I've caused some
> kind of corruption (although the system prompts me that it will remove
> conflicting packages as necessary).  

Don't worry too much about it.  If you're a complete beginner with linux
you've done fairly well so far and you'll get the hang of things soon.  The
package manager is _very_ well laid out and almost everything you do is
reversible so you can just remove the stuff you changed or installed.  

If you want to make sure everything in the default install is still
present, you can install the edubuntu-desktop package.  This won't
automatically remove extra packages, but it will require that the standard
list of packages are present.

> I'm also having trouble getting the wireless to work 

Can you tell us what card it is?  Depending if it's pci/onboard/cardbus or
usb, you can type either of:
	lspci -v
	lsusb 
and copy and paste the bit relating to the wireless card into an email.
Wireless can be difficult sometimes.

> and changing the Grub so it defaults to booting to Windows instead of
> linux if I don't make a choice in time (both on the Dell), 

In /boot/grub/menu.1st you should lines like:

	default		0
        timeout		3

which means that the first element in the boot menu is the default and this
will be launched after 3 seconds.  If you look further down the file you'll
see a bunch of stanzas like:

title		Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-10-386
root		(hd0,0)
kernel		/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-386 root=/dev/md1 ro quiet splash
initrd		/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-386
savedefault
boot

one of them should be windows.  If you change default to the number
corresponding to windows it should boot windows default.  Note that it's
counted from zero so if windows is 6th in the list, you want to put 5 in
the file.

Gavin