Unfortunately many of the big media players have not made native Linux players or plugins for their popular formats (Windows Media, QuickTime); so just trying to be a normal person and watch movie trailers online through my browser is a bit of a hack. This is that hack.
This assumes you are using Mandrake Linux 10.0, but other Linux distributions should be similar. My Mandrake install already had MPlayer installed however I found that it did not work too well with QuickTime files, so I suggest downloading and installing from source; don’t be scared this will be painless.
First download the codecs; choose the one that says all. Extract and install its contents into /usr/local/lib/codecs.
Next download the MPlayer source code. Extract and configure like so:
./configure –enable-gui
If the configure script complains of anything you will need to fix it. Most likely you will be missing a library package; in my case it was libgtk+1.2-devel-1.2.10-38mdk, which after its installation was complete the configuration script ran without error.
Next make and install:
./make
./make install
With the last instruction being done as root. mplayer and gmplayer (the MPlayer GUI) will now be installed in /usr/local/bin.
I moved the old mplayer and gmplayer in /usr/bin/ to mplayer-rpm-save and gmplayer-rpm-save respectively. I then made symlinks from /usr/local/bin/ to /usr/bin/ like so:
ln -s /usr/local/bin/mplayer /usr/bin/mplayer
ln -s /usr/local/bin/gmplayer /usr/bin/gmplayer
Next you will need fonts and skins for the MPlayer GUI. Both can be had from here. Skins go into /usr/local/share/mplayer/Skins; one of which will need to be named default. Fonts go into /usr/local/share/mplayer/fonts.
Your next, and final, step to normalcy is to install mplayerplug-in. There is an older package for Mandrake, but because there are so few files in the package I found the Fedora Core 2 package from the download site worked just fine and gave me the latest version. Once installed you will need to do whatever it is you do to have the plugin loaded by your favorite browser. Because I install the FireFox tar-balls from Mozilla.org I did another symlink:
ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/mplayerplug-in.so /usr/local/firefox/plugins/mplayerplug-in.so .
Now when I surf to QuickTime.com to view trailers everything works perfectly, and I feel a little bit more like a normal Internet surfer.
I appreciate the faq so much. I too feel just moments away from normal while surfing multimedia sites now..thanks.
Brandon
even after performing all the steps it’s not working !!!!!!!!!!
i am using redhat 9
This post is pretty old by now, so bits of information may not be true anymore; if I find something new; I’ll update the post though.
Hi guys the fix for this, if u install a Firefox tarball, i will consider u have intsall the tarbal in /opt… right ??? okey lets go
# cp /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/mplayerplug-in* /opt/firefox/plugins/
Restart firefox and all working
Just to let you know, I tried the steps as of 23rd march 2007 and it still works, on mandriva 2007.0
very happy now.