Sydney Morning Herald video in firefox/ubuntu

[Peter Garrett]

On Fri, 18 May 2007 15:40:47 +1000
"Daniel Nixon" <dan.nixon at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi list,
> Can anyone help me get smh.com.au video's working in Ubuntu 7.04? I've
> tried with the mozilla plugins for vlc, totem, mplayer but no luck.
> I'd be prepared to use any jerry rigged sort of hack, video downloader
> extension for firefox, etc.
> 
 
I managed to get the "Video News /breaking news" videos playing using
konqueror with the kmplayer plugin, but it isn't quite as you'd like -
rather stuttery until it gets going.  Still, the videos do play...

The kmplayer plugin gives you a choice between mplayer and xine backends
(assuming you have them installed of course). Right click on the plugin
display when it comes up (on the bar at the bottom) and choose mplayer ( I
couldn't get xine to coöperate )

You can use the double-arrow to skip forward past the compulsory
commercial  ( GRRR ! ) Configure "click to play" in the plugin's
right-click dialogue under "source" if you have problems with this.

Seems to play without w32codecs here on a PPC iBook laptop running Feisty
7.04 ( presumably using ffmpeg or something - great strides seem to have
been made with codecs - pity the web designers still do such brain-dead
OS-and-player-specific coding though...  )

The kmplayer plugin seems to be more configurable than the firefox
equivalents - you can look at the whole directory structure SMH have used
for their .asx methods, for instance. ( hit "playlist" in the right-click
dialogue for the plugin)

Hideously and unnecessarily complex, full of
copyrights and attributions etc etc ... I also notice the page does 
auto-refresh every few minutes, and then dumps you to an
advertisement page ... another one of my pet hates.... </ end
rant>

It *is* possible to play these on Firefox , but the way the links are set
up seems to confuse the mozilla-mplayer plugin. You might be able to get it
to work with the "Media Connectivity" extension for Firefox, but be
prepared for lock-ups when FF complains about a script not completing on
the SMH site. You might also need to fool around with the extension's
config. See

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/446

Konqueror is a pretty nice browser though - worth a shot.

Peter