Anyone have any ideas?

Actually, it's the opposite... mplayer used to have more codecs and they were taken out for legal/commercial reasons. Some people are downgrading mplayer -- see post four of this thread:

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=937

Here is a post of a Quicktime on Apple.com running in mplayer in Firefox after the downgrade (without the downgrade, you get audio only).



Trailers play in embed (for the non-HD ones), window, and full screen. Full screen 480p is pretty good... the video has minimal lag or choppiness. The first one I tried had some audio sync issues, but the second one I tried was fine. (Once you get mplayer to work, you can right click inside any video or use the controls bar underneath the video to go full screen).

Last edited by mkrishnan (2007-11-12 11:09:32 pm)

o2smartphone wrote:

VLC is a good choice.

http://865gv.kornhill.hk/eeepc/snapshot56.png

http://865gv.kornhill.hk/eeepc/snapshot57.png

Just want to add an endorsement for VLC.  I spent all night encoding trailers with Handbrake and they were all playing back slightly choppy with SMPlayer.  I was going crazy trying to figure out why.  Then I remembered that VLC played files much smoother on my old PC than Quicktime could.  So I did some snooping around and figured out how to download and install it.  It solved my problem in a big way, all my encoded files are now playing beautifully.

Any luck getting the VLC plugin working?  I installed the plugin, however mov files still load in mplayer.  In the Firefox extension manager, there is no entry for mov???  Any idea how to tell Firefox to open mov files with the VLC plugin?

After all of these endorsements I'd like a crack at VLC...

I'm new to all these Linux variations, which one should I select from the VLC download page?

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Any help appreciated!

My advice regarding vlc is to not bother installing it directly from Videolan. Use this method instead (this is kind of the standard way to install things in Xandros, Debian, Ubuntu, and related versions of Linux). It's a good learning experience too.

Open a terminal (ctrl-alt-t)
Type in (note everything I tell you to type is case sensitive, so be careful about case):

sudo pico /etc/apt/sources.list

This will open a text editor and a file that has several lines beginning with "deb" in it.  The "sudo" command makes this happen as the root, or Super User, because this is a system file and the user does not have access to it. Add this line at the bottom:

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main

Then press ctrl-x, then Y for yes, then enter to save as the same filename. This will allow you to install packages from the Debian library, which, like most Linux repositories, has VLC in it. If you want, you can use a Xandros one instead, but I can vouch for the safety of using this one.

Now you will be back at the command line:

sudo apt-get update

This will update the list of available packages for installation based on the new repository you added to the text file. Now type:

sudo apt-get install vlc

And follow the prompts. This will install VLC. After that, you can launch it from the command line:

vlc &

If you want to get rid of it, type

sudo apt-get remove vlc



As I mentioned before, though, I have no idea how to install VLC browser plugins, and this procedure will NOT do that. I use VLC for video that is NOT coming through the browser, and I use downgraded mplayer for browser video.

Last edited by mkrishnan (2007-11-16 10:32:10 am)

mkrishnan - thanks for the step by step. I am new to Linux and have been struggling with it. Yours is the best post for learning and getting things to work! I don't know the difference between kwrite and pico but the former didn't work on my eee while the latter did.

BTW I tried the downgrading mplayer instructions but kept getting the message that the mplayer version could not be found. I am not sure if others have encountered this but it might be that the codecs from the earlier version have been removed from the repository. MK

After reading this forum i just installed VLC but i'm not really seing any improvements in video performance on external monitors.  Is anyone else trying this?  It seems to have a real problem upscaling the video to fill larger screens and tearing and skipping is the result.

Chilling_Silence wrote:

Whats the resolution of the video asdf56? Video / Audio Codec? Is your EeePC running at 630MHz? Whats the resolution you're got your monitor at? Is VLC / Mplayer set to output using XV?

I don't remember the exact resolution of the video but it happened on multiple standard TV episode videos that wern't particularly large.  I was outputting to a 1024 by 768 monitor and the performance was pretty poor.  Going to 800x600 and letting the monitor do the scaling increased performance but every few seconds or so there was a noticable tear or dropped frame.  It looks to me like the scaling is happening in software which shouldn't happen if all the drivers are set up right.   

I've now installed windows and the performance is perfect regardless of the size of the external monitor.

BTW I tried the downgrading mplayer instructions but kept getting the message that the mplayer version could not be found. I am not sure if others have encountered this but it might be that the codecs from the earlier version have been removed from the repository. MK

For others who may have tried this, you may be mis-typing the name of the mplayer package. That's what I was doing. There is a tilde ("~") character between 1.0 and rc in the package name:

sudo apt-get install mplayer=1.0~rc1-12etch1

The font face makes it hard to tell that it's a tilde and not a dash.

I've added a note to the wiki.

Thanks!

Ben

Thanks Wong. I didn't do the VLC plugin. Does this mean even though I was able to download VLC, videos from the net are stll passing via Mplayer? If I play a video from a usb device it shows VLC. I wish someone would post a settings page for VLC.
                            Thanks

I installed vlc successfully and the Firefox plugin, but how do I get firefox to use it for .mov files?  Firefx thinks quicktime movies are .qt and there seems to be no way to add a new extension...