Linux Multimedia Hacks

Watch Videos Within Firefox

Use mplayerplug-in to view video embedded into web pages.

If you chat with a group of geeks for any extended period of time, the conversation inevitably steers into talks of the “good old days” of computing, when geeks were geeks and you edited your files with a magnet and a magnifying glass. Let me be the first to break rank and say that the good old days of watching embedded web video under Linux were anything but. In the case of QuickTime video (such as movie trailers), once Linux was able to play them, you still couldn’t watch them in a browser: instead you had to put on your detective hat and often dig around in the web page source for the URL you needed to download the video. That of course was only if you could find the right URL.

MPlayer’s support of streaming URLs from the command line improved things a bit, but considering the steps Windows users had to take to watch video streams on the Web, it was still pretty troublesome. A breakthrough came with the creation of the mplayerplug-in—a plug-in for Mozilla-based browsers (Konqueror is not currently supported) that embedded MPlayer into web pages offering streaming video. Now every video that MPlayer can play outside of the browser you can play embedded inside the browser so the experience is more or less the same as browsing under Windows.

Since mplayerplug-in uses MPlayer for all the video playback, you will need MPlayer version 0.92 or higher installed on your system. ( [Hack #48] explains ...