2008-11-25 00:10
Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with
control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and
notes are available on
the
Debian wiki. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME
types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the
audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No
wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.
For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to be the only one fitting our needs. :/