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Playing Restricted Media When Using Ubuntu

Mar 03, 2009  By Shawn Powers
 in
FAIL (the browser should render some flash content, not this).

How to install the extra packages necessary to play web video and other restricted media formats.

Download in .ogv format

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Slight problem - solved

John Muir's picture
Submitted by John Muir (not verified) on Wed, 03/04/2009 - 01:10.

If I copy the URL from the Apple page source code and start it in a new tab, it works perfectly. So it must just be a small problem in my Firefox plugin/config and nothing to do with restricted extras. Sorry for the false alarm...

Slight problem

John Muir's picture
Submitted by John Muir (not verified) on Wed, 03/04/2009 - 00:36.

I've got the restricted extras installed but when I tried to watch one of those Apple trailers in Firefox the small pop-up window appeared, but remained black & silent. Hmmm...

Video capture software

Andres Monroy's picture
Submitted by Andres Monroy (not verified) on Tue, 03/03/2009 - 15:57.

Just curious. What software did you use to capture the video of your Ubuntu screen? I've tried several and most of them generate choppy video.

For this one

Shawn Powers's picture
Submitted by Shawn Powers on Tue, 03/03/2009 - 16:01.

For this particular video, I used SnapX-Pro on a mac, capturing a VM running Ubuntu. I've had good luck with a couple different screencasting programs in Linux though. I actually did a how-to video a while back on the topic:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/video/make-screencast

Shawn Powers is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal. You might find him chatting on the IRC channel, or Twitter

Great!

FErArg's picture
Submitted by FErArg (not verified) on Tue, 03/03/2009 - 14:24.

Thanks! great help!!

Do you see the irony here?

nomasteryoda's picture
Submitted by nomasteryoda (not verified) on Tue, 03/03/2009 - 13:20.

A video on how to enable non-free formats such as Web Video in Linux? Doesn't it hold true that the same target audience would be unable to view this content?

I'm just asking for caption information to at least tell how to play this flash video on Linux. There is always a better idiot....

I know

Shawn Powers's picture
Submitted by Shawn Powers on Tue, 03/03/2009 - 13:50.

Someone commented the same thing when I showed how to do it in Fedora too. :)

The linked OGV file should be playable by anyone though. Hopefully that will help those struggling with viewing the file. As far as commands go, as long as all the extra repositories are enabled a simple "sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras" should do the trick.

Shawn Powers is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal. You might find him chatting on the IRC channel, or Twitter

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