repost of "Re: more multimedia stuff (RealPlayer, etc.)"

[Paul Higgins]

On Thursday 07 December 2006 11:27, Kai Staats wrote:
> On Wednesday 22 November 2006 23:24, Paul Higgins wrote:
> > In particular, I figured out
> > a way to get some Flash animations and banners to work on many websites
> > (using the Firefox browser--see my previous posts).

OK, here's what I've discovered.  Not surprisingly, Flash multimedia sites 
like YouTube do not work.  However, sites that use Flash to do banners for 
ads, etc. DO work.  I've checked this against my work machine (x86 Debian).  
What is probably doing the trick is the flashplayer.xpt plugin for Firefox.  
I think the other plugin (libflashplayer.so) is x86-only.  I can't tell for 
sure, as the Adobe site does not make it at all clear, but the fact that I 
can't get YouTube to work at all suggests that libflashplayer.so is 
incompatible.  The .xpt plugins for Mozilla are totally cross-platform.

> Can you plz send that post to me directly? Thanks ...

Here you go:

===========================================================
> Right now i'll work on installing firefox instead. Paul can you post how
> you got firefox to run shockwave flash? and will this enable me to view
> shockwave flash enabled we pages?

I'm trying to remember exactly what I did--I believe the following is 
accurate, though.  I was visiting sites where Firefox was nagging me about 
how I needed to install a Flash player/extension to see everything on that 
site, and so I clicked "Install", which then took me to the Adobe site (Adobe 
bought Macromedia, I guess), and there was a download for Linux.  Here's the 
site (watch the word wrap on this--it's all one line):

http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&P2_Platform=Linux  

So I copied/printed the directions from the Adobe site, downloaded the file, 
and then unpacked the download (it's a .tgz compressed file).  Then I printed 
out more directions from the unpacked file.  At which point I found out that 
the install script is x86-only.  Lovely.  So then I read through the 
directions again, and found some info on doing a manual install/uninstall.  
Then, quite frankly, I did some guessing.  The Adobe instructions gave me 
some clues:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
To remove the Plug-in Player for Linux:

For root users:

- Quit the browser.
- Navigate to the browser's plug-in directory 
(i.e. /usr/local/mozilla/plugins).
- Remove libflashplayer.so and flashplayer.xpt.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

That told me that I needed to move these files into the plugins directory--in 
other words, the reverse of these directions.  The problem is 
that /usr/local/mozilla/plugins doesn't exist!  But /usr/bin/mozilla 
and /usr/bin/plugins do exist, so I copied libflashplayer.so and 
flashplayer.xpt into both of these directories.  I don't know if this gives 
you fully functional Flash capabilities (I haven't gone to enough Flash sites 
to be sure), but it definitely gave me working animations and banners in 
Firefox.  

By the way, for some reason, Firefox uses the same plugin directory that 
Mozilla does--there is no separate /usr/bin/firefox. 
========================================================

> We are now moving to solidify a set of apps for audio/video recording and
> playback. I know RealPlayer works well, as I can watch the videos that Red
> Hat has posted on their site. However, the method of saving the video is
> very specific to the particular version of RealPlayer available for YDL.

I'll be looking forward to that.  PPC Linux *should* be the Linux of choice 
for multimedia, especially since so many people who create multimedia use 
Macs.  And there are some really interesting things happening for Linux when 
it comes to multimedia, particularly electronic music.  Here's an excellent 
site that some may have seen before:

http://linux-sound.org/

-PRH