After a long time using the feature-less VLC-Plugin, and messing things up with the MediaPlayerConnectivity plugin to open lots of stand-alone VLC windows every time I wanted to watch BBC or CBC News videos, I finally got the Mplayer plugin to work fine and play all those embedded videos with no stuttering or annoyances.

Hardy Heron (8.04) (for previous versions, scroll to the bottom of this post)

While Stage6 does not exist anymore, the daily BBC News Videos are still a challenge for Ubuntu. Out of the box, Hardy cannot play them. Even after installing hardy’s restricted codecs (which we will do below), they do not work past the BBC corporate announcement, and even that takes about half a minute to start playing back.

We will fix the problem by reconfiguring Firefox to use the Mplayer plugin, installing the restricted codecs (to ensure windows media plays) and later installing the Real Video codecs from the Medibuntu repo. Finally, we will set the BBC News site preferences to stream Real Video. The end result will be: BBC news video play nicely and start very fast, plus all other sites to windows media or flash streaming work fine as well.

First part: the mplayer plugin and the basic codecs Read the rest of this entry »