I recently set up my computer to dual boot Win XP Pro and Mandrake 10, and so far it's a move I've been very happy with. I've managed to get pretty much everything set up and configured how I like it, but there's only one last bit that I can't seem to get working. That is, I can't seem to give Firefox a movie plugin with working sound. I've tried both mozplugger (1.5.2-3mdk) and mplayerplugin (1.0-0.pre2.1mdk) and they both seem almost identical... The only visible difference is that mplayerplugin will show me a loading screen as it loads a movie. Although I see some controls in the screenshots on mplayerplugin's site, they do not appear. Most importantly though, both of them are completely silent. This is particularly strange because this is the only problem I've had with sound at all... The flash plugin works fine, as do external programs like XMMS, and even mplayer itself. I'm currently trying to set this up for Firefox 0.9, but I also have Mozilla 1.6 installed, with no better luck. Firefox is simply the extracted archive from mozilla.org, and Mozilla 1.6 is installed from the Mandrake 10 discs. Has anyone else had similar problems? What might be causing these plugins to be silent? What can I do to fix this? Thanks in advance! -Arek the Absolute

Are you using ALSA for sound or the older OSS?

I'm not sure if that'll make a difference or not...

On another note, I had some weird problems with both of these plugins. They didn't work at all when I had Slackware running, but on Gentoo, they worked fine. I don't know why this is at all...

Quote: Original post by Strife
Are you using ALSA for sound or the older OSS?

I'm not sure if that'll make a difference or not...

On another note, I had some weird problems with both of these plugins. They didn't work at all when I had Slackware running, but on Gentoo, they worked fine. I don't know why this is at all...

To be honest, I'm too much of a Linux newbie to know the answer to that. I suppose it's whatever Mandrake 10 installs with. However, in better news, I did manage to work the problem out. I noticed looking through the mplayer plugin site that there are examples for testing that mplayer itself is working properly, and it showed me that it wasn't actually the plugin acting up, it was that mplayer itself was using sound with streaming video. So after a long while I managed to peice together the dependencies (I couldn't seem to find any urpmi repositories that had the only newer version of mplayer than mine) I built the newest version, installed the mplayer plugin again, and although I'm still not seeing the control bar at the bottom, I do get sound, which is obviously more important. Who knows? Maybe that last bit will come together once I install mplayer's GUI. Thanks for the advice anyway though!

-Arek the Absolute

Good job!

As for ALSA versus OSS... ALSA is the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, and with the advent of the 2.6 kernel is becoming the standard for sound. OSS (Open Sound System) was the old way of doing things, and is beginning to be phased out.

I don't know too much about Mandrake, but I would assume that it uses ALSA by default.