Giguhbite Random Musings

I’ve had the eee pc for about a month and a half and I’ve love it. Despite it’s underpowered 900 Mhz processor, it’s pretty zippy (it runs some applications faster than my two year old 2.2 GHz ppc iMac g5). Unfortunately, one of the problems I’ve experienced with it is it’s problems with online video. Youtube, metacafe, google videos, vimeo, etc. all work fine. The problem occurs with movie files, such as mpgs and movs

One of the big problems is due to Mplayers lack of video codecs due to copyright protection. If you try to play a video codec that isn’t supported only the sound will play through. After trying numerous times to downgrade Mplayer to get those codecs I succeeded, but many videos I played were extremely choppy, to the point that they weren’t watchable. To circumnavigate this problem I downloaded the videos and watched them using VLC without any problem, but I was unable to play videos within Firefox.

Just today I figured out how to get VLC as the default video plugin for firefox. Simply type:

sudo apt-get remove mozilla-mplayer
sudo apt-get install mozilla-plugin-vlc

And that’s it. If you ever need to restore the default video plugin to mplayer just type in:
sudo apt-get remove mozilla-plugin-vlc
sudo apt-get install mozilla-mplayer

So far, it has worked great, but I’m not positive it will work on all sites. Please leave a comment if you find any problems.