Wandering Thoughts: Recent Entries For 2006/06/09

Seeing Quicktime movie trailers on Fedora Core 5

Today I got Linux one more step into being a proper, fully functioning system: I got Quicktime movie trailers displaying in Firefox. It turned out to be pretty easy once I realized what was going wrong.

I'll assume that you've got the Unofficial Fedora Core FAQ handy. Directions in a nutshell:

1. install rpm.livna.org's livna-release package. (Ignore the other bits of the unofficial FAQ's instructions; they're not necessary as far as I can tell.)
2. yum install mplayerplug-in
3. install the w32codec RPM from atrpms.net. You'll need to get the RPM by hand from here. (I'm not sure how the FAQ's instructions are supposed to work since the livna-release RPM doesn't set up any repository stuff for the atrpms RPM repository, so yum has no idea where to get 'atrpms' stuff from.)
4. rpm -e totem-mozplugin

The last step is the crucial one. Without it, you have both Totem and MPlayer trying to claim various video formats, and Firefox decides that Totem wins. Unfortunately, Totem is kind of lacking in codec support, so the result with trailers is that the video display area starts up but pukes, sometimes with mysterious errors. Removing the totem-mozplugin RPM gets Firefox to use the MPlayer plugin, which works.

(As far as I can tell, Firefox has no way to control which plugin gets called on to display content, so you have to outright remove the Totem plugin instead of just setting the MPlayer plugin to a higher priority.)

My glee may sound petty, but playing movie trailers and other amusing videos you find on the web is one of the few things that I haven't been able to do under Linux that I really wanted to. In the past, I've even resorted to firing up VMWare when I got curious about a trailer. (Of course, now I have new shiny tempting diversion at work. Oops.)