Caleb, That makes complete sense. Thanks much. One other question. Once I gave up on VLC for the time being, I fiddled with Totem. Got to Apples site to look at some of the help videos and here's what happens: The screen appears to play the video but no video comes out. I verified the browser knows what kind of video it is (ff-3.0 beta btw) but still no video. OK I figured if I look at the page source it would tell me what kind of video the site was streaming and turns out it's a ".mov" (default quicktime format) file. I plug the link from the source code into totem and the video plays no problem (which is kinda cool). So I think FF doesn't know how to pass the url to Totem properly, do you know if a switch can do this for Totem. I tried the "--enqueue" and "--replace" options but they will start totem but not with a URL. Here is how it looks in my "preferred applications" settings: "totem --replace" but like I said this doesn't work. It's not a big deal because as I find it seems only a problem with the apple website so far so I'm not interested in fixing it, but, conceivably, though it could be a problem with other sites. Is this yet another fix floating around in Hardy :-) Thanks again. -- Patience yields far greater results than brute force or rage ever could so relax......it's just life !!!