Somebody fix this.

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My sister came up to me with a Fedora predicament™ today. She was attempting to play this file (a .asx file) in a media player.

It wouldn’t work. What a surprise!

Since it looked like it might be something that would actually refer to another file, I threw it in curl just to see what would happen.

[ianweller@kupenblagster ~]$ curl http://realvideo.acinet.org/asxgen/Eng/27-1021.00.wmv.asx
<ASX Version = "3.0">
   <ENTRY>
      <REF HREF = "mms://64.94.25.81:1755/Eng/27-1021.00.wmv"/>
      <REF HREF = "http://64.94.25.81:80/Eng/27-1021.00.wmv"/>
   </ENTRY>
</ASX>

Also interesting: what happens when you try and curl the http:// url? You get a 404 not found error. However, when playing the file with MPlayer, the video plays. Hmm.

So, I decided I should run -dumpstream from MPlayer on my slice and allow her to download and watch the video from there. We click on the .wmv link, and a dialog asks us to search for some plugins to play this file. Hmm, OK, we find the plugins, it installs relatively quickly. How nice!

Totem’s Firefox plugin tells us that it can’t play the file. I don’t remember the error off-hand, but an updated install of Fedora 10 on that same file should yield the same error.

So I ask: why doesn’t this work, and what can I do (that’s within my realm of ability—read: not much) to help make this work?

5 thoughts on “Somebody fix this.”

  1. Last time I checked, with archive of one of Slovak televisions, they were checking the user agent. I’ve set this in my wife’s kickstart back then:

    # Mplayer
    mkdir -p /etc/skel/.mplayer
    cat >/etc/skel/.mplayer/config </etc/skel/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf <<EOF
    user-agent=NSPlayer/10.0.0.1337
    EOF

    The reason for that was that MPlayer by default sent just “NSPlayer” (w/o version) which satisfied only some servers IIRC. I think mplayerplug-in has been obsoleted since then, but there’s another mplayer-based mozilla plugin for your firefox around that you can use as a replacement for Totem one (but maybe Totem will do too if configured — haven’t checked).

  2. In case the above snippet doesn’t make sense — seems like WordPress omited part of it considering it a HTML tag or whatever. You can get the point there though — having the user-agent line in both of the config files.

  3. From MPlayer-based plugins for web browser, there’s GNOME-MPlayer with its plugin.

    And about Totem’s ASX playback and other things around – it hurts :/ .

  5. @Lubomir: interesting. i thought about the user agent but then i got lazy.

    @Livio: I was looking for that in PackageKit but couldn’t find it… so it’s been included with GNOME MPlayer now?

    @Austin: woo

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