10 Feb 2009 ianweller   » (Journeyer)

Somebody fix this.

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?

Syndicated 2009-02-10 03:46:56 from ian weller » Advogato

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