blog/data/2008-11-25-browserplugins.txt

   1 Title: The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian
   2 Tags: english, debian, multimedia, web, debian edu
   3 Date: 2008-11-25 00:10
   4
   5 <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
   6 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
   7 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
   8 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
   9 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
  10 notes are available on
  11 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
  12 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
  13 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
  14 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
  15 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
  16 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
  17 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
  18 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
  19 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
  20
  21 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
  22 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>