Why Standalone??

[Norberto Meijome]

On Sun, 14 Oct 2007 15:26:55 -0700
Gary Kline <kline at tao.thought.org> wrote:

> Can any of you explain why (with firefox) whenever I click to
> 	listen to a stream, the website cannot tell that I have
> 	realplayer (or mplayer) installed?  And why it sometimes 
> 	[hopefully] asks if I want to use a "Standalone" player?

hi Gary,
Firefox uses the mime type returned by the server to determine the content type, and how to handle it.
When you install a plugin or an extension, they usually update firefox's configuration to tell it how to handle the media type it (the plugin / extension) is designed to handle. 

eg, from about:plugins :

DivX Browser Plug-In

    File name: mplayerplug-in-dvx.so
    mplayerplug-in 3.45

    Video Player Plug-in for QuickTime, RealPlayer and Windows Media Player streams using MPlayer
    JavaScript Enabled and Using GTK2 Widgets

MIME Type 	Description 	Suffixes 	Enabled
video/divx 	DivX Media Format 	divx 	Yes
video/vnd.divx 	DivX Media Format 	divx 	Yes

When a server sends something marked with a mime type of video/divx, the mplayerplug-in-dvx.so is used. 

If you are browsing to a new media type that hasn't been handled before, firefox will usually ask you what  to do with it (open with... ,save to disk..,etc). These options are sometimes saved. to change them, Edit, Preferences, Content, File types.

Many music streams are notorious for not sending correct media type... if it doesnt work, i just copy the url into VLC or XMMS or mplayer and use it from there... that *always* works.

B
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{Beto|Norberto|Numard} Meijome

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