On Aug 8, 2007, at 9:21 PM, Bill Schwab wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> The Windows box I use for net access at home is getting very flaky,
> and
> I am almost to the point of putting the drive in my Ubuntu system
> for a
> one-time file transfer. Almost. Games I can largely live w/o or
> simply
> play on other machines. One thing that I would seriously miss is
> streaming video (NASA TV in particular -
> http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/). I have had enough trouble
> with
> AV formats that I didn't even try the stuff in the menus, but I did do
> some searching and quickly landed at http://www.real.com/linux.
> Anyone
> tried it? Is it going to make me sorry I installed it? Any better
> options? NASA offers windows media, real, flash and quick time. Is
> there a clear lesser of evils?

As Eldo points out, who cares what the "official" player is, you just
want the right codec. It turns out that VLC can natively handle the
Windows Media 9 (WMV3, WMA2) stream quite well. Sadly, none of the
other streams worked all that well with VLC.

That said, installing the restricted codecs can really help the build
in totem player handle a lot of different media:

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Feisty#How_to_add_extra_repositories

(the medibuntu repo is shown as the example)

That plus:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras w32codecs

Is what I usually do when setting up an ubuntu client machine for
someone who wants parity with what they're used to in windows.

--
Jordan Wiens, CISSP
UF Network Security Engineer
(352)392-2061