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Using the Fabulous MPlayer
Whenever a desperate need exists, the Superman — err — the open source movement, comes in to save the day. Until recently, you couldn’t use any single Linux application to listen to and view most popular streaming formats. Now, MPlayer has burst on the scene and fills that gap.MPlayer can play most popular (and many obscure) audio and video streaming formats. Although it’s under intense development, it’s still technically in the beta development phase. However, MPlayer is quite usable, and we think that you should consider using it. We do!This list shows some streaming formats MPlayer can play:MPEG-1/Layer 3 (MP3): MP3 is a popular but proprietary codec used for both storing and streaming audio.
Ogg/Vorbis: This new up-and-coming open source streaming format is unencumbered by any copyrights or patents, like other formats are.
Microsoft Media Server (MMS): You can listen to radio broad casts that use the popular MMS format with MPlayer. Previously, you needed to use the Microsoft client to listen to MMS streams.
Digital Versatile Disc (DVD): You can play DVDs from your computer with MPlayer.
RealAudio: You need to download, compile, and install the RTSP package to use RealAudio.
MPlayer is not now included in the Red Hat Linux distribution. We hope that it will be later, but for now you have to obtain it from its developers. These steps describe how to download, install, and use MPlayer:
Log in, open Mozilla, and go to www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/dloadl.
Click the latest Red Hat RPM version.
At the time this book was written, the latest Red Hat RPMS was found in the MPlayer Red Hat 7.x RPM packages. The 7.x packages work on Red Hat 10 systems.
Download each of these packages:
mplayer
mplayer-common
mplayer-gui
mplayer-skins
and this font package:
MplayerISO-885901-font
At the time this edition of the book was written, the most recent MPlayer RPM package was version 0.92. You may see — and should use — the most recent version available.
Open a GNOME Terminal window and change to root:
su -
Enter the root password when prompted.
Install the package:
rpm -ivh –-nodeps mplayer*
One good source for audio streams is www.shoutcast.com. Click any of the Tune In! buttons and Mozilla downloads several playlists and launches MPlayer to play the music via the playlists.Playlists are files that store the locations of one or more audio and video streams. For example, if you click any of the Shoutcast streams (at www. shoutcast.com), Mozilla saves the playlist to the /tmp directory, starts MPlayer, and directs it to play the playlists. The playlist MIME type, x-scpls, was inserted into Mozilla as a helper application when you installed the MPlayer packages.Tip Alternatively, you can click the Save to disk button and save the playlist to your home directory. You can then manually start MPlayer from a terminal emulator window or the Run Program utility with the command mplayer -playlist playlist.pls.
You can use MPlayer to play music files too. Suppose that you use grip in Chapter 11 to save some music to a file named track1.wav. Enter this command to play that file:
mplayer track1.wav
Press the Control key and then the C key (Ctrl-c) to end the session.You can use MPlayer to listen to all sorts of streams. The entire world of Internet radio and — hopefully, soon — video broadcasts is open to you. MPlayer will only become more versatile and useful.TipMPlayer plays DVDs too! Use the command grep -i dvd /var/log/dmesg to locate the DVD device file. For example, your DVD device file should be something like /dev/hdd. Next, create a soft link file so that MPlayer knows where to find the DVD drive: ln -s /dev/hdd /dev/dvd. Start MPlayer, right-click the MPlayer – Video window and choose OpenTipThe first MPlayer RealAudio (using the RTSP protocol) plug-in was just recently released from www.live.com/mplayer. The plug-in is still too young for easy use, but soon will be. Keep an eye on this system. When the Live.com RTSP plug-in for MPlayer matures, you can listen to an outstanding interview with The Man himself — Linus Torvalds — by opening this URL from gmplayer or MPlayer:
rtsp://audio.npr.org/fa/20010604.fa.rm
In this clip, Terri Gross, from National Public Radio, conducts an interview during the summer of 2001 on her program, “Fresh Air.” Linus discusses the development of Linux, his life in Silicon Valley, and other matters. You can also use the commercial RealPlayer8 to listen to this or any RealAudio stream. The section in Chapter 11 about plugging in plug-ins describes where to obtain the RealPlayer8 RPM package.
Audio by proxy: Getting XMMS to work through your firewall
Firewalls are necessary to fight the evil guys who lurk on the Internet, but they can put a kink in your listening pleasure. A firewall is used to prevent unauthorized access from the outside — in most cases, the Internet — from reaching your computer or network.The firewall we show you how to build in Chapter 8 and the default Red Hat firewall don’t affect either of the players described in this chapter. However, many LANs are connected through proxy firewalls, which intercept packets sent to the Internet and rewrite them according to certain rules; our firewalls are filter packets based on their source and destination addresses and ports.If your Red Hat Linux workstation sits on a network with a packet-filtering firewall, such as the one you may have installed in Chapter 8, you don’t need to modify XMMS. The key is that the filtering firewall allows all outgoing TCP and UDP connections (or ports). However, if your network uses a proxy-based firewall, you may have to modify XMMS. (gmplayer doesn’t have any mechanism specifically designed to work with proxies.)To configure XMMS to work with proxy firewalls, follow these steps:
Start XMMS, right-click the XMMS window, and choose OptionsPreferences.
Click the Ogg Vorbis plug-in in the Input Plug-ins subwindow and click Configure.The Ogg Vorbis Configuration window opens. You need to enter the address of your proxy server. You may need to contact your friendly neighborhood systems administrator to get that information.
Click the Use Proxy button and enter the proxy server address in the Host subwindow.
Click the Use Authentication radio button and enter your username and password in their respective subwindows if your proxy server requires them.
