GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 342956
ASX is broken with gstreamer
Last modified: 2006-06-05 23:34:15 UTC
Please describe the problem: Go to drudgereport yesterday. (One of the most popular websites) See the direct link to this video: http://interface.audiovideoweb.com/lnk/ny60win16080/eresources/cei/GorevideoWMV-low.wmv/play.asx click on it and try to play it. Video is gone, audio is constantly buffering. Steps to reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Expected results: Does this happen every time? YES! Other information: Its frustrating how many videos I run into which are ASX and therefore don't work with totem-gstreamer! Do any of the gstreamer developers ever surf the web?
The video is a proprietary Windows Media Codec we can't decode properly yet. You can try pitfdll, but that will only work on x86 and has stability issues with other codecs. The audio should work though I think. I get the same weird buffering behaviour here. FWIW, xine seems to be the only player who can play this stream. Both mplayer or VLC can play neither video nor audio here.
All I know is that I surf the web and run into tons of content that gstreamer doesn't handle and it bloes. Linux / Windows interop status: ------------------------------- Samba handles SMB well Debian-installer resizes NTFS partitions OpenOffice, Gnome Office and KOffice read Office documents Winmodems work FireFox has good compatibility with sites designed for IE Ndiswrapper handles network cards, Mono handles C# and even VS.Net makefiles Etc. From my experience, the weak link in Windows compatibility is multimedia.
First of all ASX is a playlist format, it contains URL's to various video streams. If you open this URL in totem it works fine. Totem parses the playlist and passes the MMS URI to GStreamer. The mmssrc in gst-plugins-bad manages to get the stream fine. There is no open source decoder yet for WMV9, so Totem with open source GStreamer only plays the audio, but it plays the audio fine. The video works with the fluendo Windows Media plugin. I haven't tested, but I would assume it works with the pitfdll Windows dll loader also. I am closing this a not a bug. There is a Google SoC project to implement Windows Media Video 9/VC1 as part of ffmpeg. if that project suceeds we will have an open source decoder.
If I could fix one thing in Ubuntu, it would be the ability to play the various WMVs I run into as I surf. I wait patiently and hope its a productive 'summer' :-)