Well, iFilm.com has suddenly started working right with Firefox & Real Player 10 on Linux. No more crazy "You need RealONE player" prompts. Yay! So, I think they have vindicated themselves for now.

Sadly, wthr.com still sucks and will likely remain so for a long time. I've been told their media doesn't even play on the latest version of Windows Mobile edition on PocketPC. It displays the same "You need Internet Explorer 6 and Windows XP" message. You'd think that with the huge areas of Indianapolis covered by WiFi wireless Internet access they'd want people to be able to watch the news while they eat breakfast, lunch or whatever. Alas, I think they just don't get it at all.

For the last few days Firefox (a recent unstable snapshot from Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog) has been refusing to view or save certain types of multimedia. Mostly things like Real .ram playlists. I found that throwing away mimeTypes.rdf in my profile fixed the problem. Of course, it also meant I had to tell it which programs open which types of files. But that's fine by me. The defaults are mostly right since, I think, it asks GNOME what programs support a particular type of file. The only thing I had to change was totem to realplayer for streaming Real Media. Totem is fine for most media formats but I think Real Player 10 generally does a better job of playing Real Media.

I installed the latest Real Player 10 release today since there was a security issue of some sort with older versions. I figured out how to make a Debian package out of it, also. I cheated and used Linspire's "src" package as an example. But I stripped out all of the KDE mimelnk files since they conflicted with existing KDE packages. I left just the launchers and icons specified by freedesktop.org standards.

Labels: linux