With native FireFox, some sites hosting videos (streaming?) require the
installation of a plug-in. This is fine if you use Windows as it is a
Microsoft media plug-in. If like me you use Linux, then the simplest
solution I found was to use the 'unplug' extension and then download the
relevant file found.
Look at the 'Video News' section at
http://www.theage.com.au/
That was until last night!
Then I discovered the Kaffeine Starter Plug-in. This will start the external
Kaffeine Media Player for embedded media streams. This similar to how the
Microsoft plug-in for windows works with Windows Media Player. Obviously
you will need Kaffeine and win32 codecs installed for this to work
I use Mandriva 2007.0 and the package involved is called kaffeine-mozilla.
With Mandriva, install the plug-in and then copy
the /usr/lib/mozilla/plug-in/kaffeineplugin.so file to the plug ins
directory used by FireFox. This will depend on whether your installation
is the 'native' Mandriva version or one that you have installed yourself
using a gzipped tar available from the Mozilla site [e.g.
firefox-1.5.0.11.tar.gz]. Also for Mandriva, the win32 codecs package is
(surprise! surprise!) called win32-codecs
If not aware where other distros store these files or installation details,
but more info should be on
http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=download
For me anyway, this plug-in gets rid of one of the final items on my list
of 'things that Linux does not do as well as Windows'.
I hope this is useful to some other current or potential penguinistas here!
Rob.
Linux