mplayerplug-in

What is the required software?

For the mplayerplug-in to work correctly you need to install mplayer and install all the optional codecs for it. If you do not install the codecs several formats may not work. Mplayer v1.0pre5 is the minimal version.
For Apple.com HD trailers a version of mplayer newer than Oct 2005 is required.
Recommended components of mplayer:

FAAD
lame and/or lame-devel
live.com (needed for rtsp/sdp urls)

All I see is the "mplayerplug-in buffering" message. What do I do?

This seems to be a very common question. Usually it means that either the video you are trying to view is unreachable by mplayer, the media is corrupt, mplayer does not have a codec to play the video, it is a misconfiguration or you have an old version of mplayer.
Also try setting the vo to x11, as this may fix many problems with video output.

mplayerplug-in buffers 99% and hangs

This can becaused by a few things:

mplayer is not in the path
An older version of mplayer is installed
The config option "rtsp-use-tcp=1" is set and mplayer is not compiled with the live.com support

The mozilla about:plugins page says that it handles [movie type] but [movie type] videos don't work for me.

All the playing and decoding of videos is done with mplayer. So if there is a problem with a particular video usually the probelm is one of the following

Support for that video type was not compiled into mplayer
Video type is not supported by mplayer
Video is corrupt
Try setting the following options equal to 0: cookies or noconsolecontrols or nomouseinput. You can see if your version of mplayer needs this by typeing the following
```
mplayer -cookies
```
If it comes back with the error "Unknown option on the command line: cookies". Set cookies=0 in mplayerplug-in.conf. Repeat for the other options.

Does the plugin work with proxies?

Updated 10/3/2003 As of version 1.0pre2 all supported Mozilla protocols (http,https,ftp,file,etc) are handled through Mozilla. So if Mozilla is configured to use a proxy the content should be able to be downloaded. The only exception to this is mms:// streams which are not a supported Mozilla protocol. However, proxy support via mplayer may solve the problem. I have been told that mplayer respects the HTTP_PROXY variable.

HTTP_PROXY=http://your.proxy:80
export HTTP_PROXY

http_proxy might need to be in lower case for some configurations.

Also if you write a script to encapsulate mplayer it might work. For example: something like this might work with a socks proxy

#!/bin/sh
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libtsocks.so
export LD_PRELOAD
/usr/local/bin/mplayer.orig

copy mplayer to mplayer.orig
Name that script /usr/local/bin/mplayer

Why does the plugin not handle some streaming video?

Some sites have their content protected with cookies or session variables. Since the plugin hands off the URL, that the video is coming from, to mplayer; mplayer may not have the correct authentication to download the video. This type of problem is usually seen at site that require a subscription.

What are the issues with streaming video?

Updated 10/3/2003 The only issues with streaming video now is if the stream is behind a protected URL.

Videos play twice and I get double images and double sound

This problem has been observed in Mozilla 1.0 and Galeon 1.2.6. Upgrading Mozilla to 1.1 or higher is recommended to solve this problem.

How do I make mplayerplug-in work in Opera?(Not recommended)

Make sure that you have gecko-sdk 1.6 newer versions will not work properly with Opera
Download the source code then do these following commands in the source code directory:

./configure --enable-x  [--with-gecko-sdk={path} ]
make
cp mplayerplug-in.so /usr/lib/opera/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/libxpcom.so /usr/lib

Media at apple.com/trailers does not play or has no sound

Sometimes when a reference file is used and contains media in multiple speeds there is an error in the reference file that points to an invalid URL. Setting the config option qt-speed to either low or high and reloading the page sometimes corrects this error.

If the trailer plays but there is no sound, this can be caused by mplayer not being compiled with FAAD support. FAAD is the AC3 decoder that is needed to decode the audio in some quicktime files. This can also be caused by missing or unsupported codecs.

mplayerplug-in does not compile on Debian

See bug 1023442 for a workaround and a description of the error.
This bug should be fixed with version 2.75

mplayerplug-in menus and buttons do not show up on Debian

The package mozilla-mplayer as packaged by the Debian project omits many of the features of mplayerplug-in. The packager has decided to not include the GTK2 functionality of the plugin. Recompiling with the libgtk2-dev libXpm-dev and other packages installed creates an mplayerplug-in package that works much better. I have tested this on Ubuntu and Linspire. From version 3.01 the Debian package now uses GTK2 by default.

Javscript methods do not work

This is normally a packaging error. The xpt files are not included in the package or have not been placed in the correct location.

All I get is a grey box

If you are using the gecko-sdk method, make sure you are using the right version of it. I recommend gecko-sdk 1.6 for Mozilla 1.6 and Firefox < 1.2 (check your about: location) and see what the version following rv: is. If it is 1.7.x it is ok to use gecko-sdk 1.7 otherwise use gecko-sdk 1.6.