Why can't we watch the news in Linux?

I have been working overtime this Christmas season to help my father and brother improve their experience in Ubuntu 6.10. One of the deficiencies we have encountered is the limited ability to watch news videos from a web-browser (such as Firefox 2.0). I have installed Flash Player 9 Beta 2, and the Good-Bad-Ugly plugins for GStreamer. Here is what happens when we try to watch news videos on these large news sites.

ABC News
  • Sound: NO
  • Video: NO
BBC News
  • Sound: YES
  • Video: NO
CBS News
  • Sound: NO
  • Video: NO
CNBC
  • Sound: NO
  • Video: NO
CNN
  • Sound: YES
  • Video: NO
FOX News
  • Sound: YES
  • Video: NO
MSNBC
  • Sound: YES
  • Video: YES
Don't you find it ironic that the only major news website that I could get to play videos is owned by Microsoft? Is there anything I can do to get these other websites to play videos properly?

Comments

  1. Anonymous12/28/2006 9:44 PM

    I would suggest trying vlc or mplayer. Try the 'mozilla-mplayer' package or 'mozilla-plugin-vlc'.

    Hope those help

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous1/02/2007 5:37 PM

    I really don't find it too amazing that MSNBC works in linux. Despite what some people say Microsoft has done an excellent job improving thier compatability and following standards.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous1/18/2007 10:20 PM

    Ubuntu (and GUI enabled GNU/Linux variants) may not be "ready for prime time" out of the box, and there are some necessary additions needed if you want to play in a world dominated by Window$. EasyUbuntu and Automatix2 gather some additional programs and codecs with transparent ease, but it also does sometime take some investigation on message boards and search engines to find the more esoteric solutions.

    "Betcha" if you post your list on http://ubuntuforums.org/
    along sith some specs on your PC, within a couple of hours you'll have a native app or a workaround to enable the viewing of them all.

    ReplyDelete
  4. macewan1/19/2007 1:31 AM

    @emarkay, with ABCnews video there does seem to be a problem. It's using an old sniffer script from last year. Not sure if this is a problem though.
    http://abc.go.com/site/videohelp.html

    I would definitely recommend mplayer over gstreamer. I getting a no stream from their player.

    Good thing Youtube.com 'just worked' - otherwise their content would have been worthless to quite a few people. Read: advertisers aren't able to reach the folks that are excluded from the media *coughLinux*.

    cheers

    ReplyDelete
  5. Arvind Narayanan5/03/2007 4:07 AM

    I agree with the anonymous comment above. The microsoft bashing is getting old, let's focus on getting things to work.

    I was on some sort of firefox marketing team or whatever they called it for a while a long time ago. If someone wrote factually incorrect stuff about firefox or had content that didn't display correctly, we'd write to them very politely but very firmly in a way that they'd feel they were killing puppies. It was very effective. Ubuntu really needs something like that. I'd totally volunteer for it. Could someone set up something like this? Please?

    ReplyDelete

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