Viewing video from the BBC News website and other websites that use Real Player

I have to confess, I only discovered this yesterday. For nearly a year, I was searching for a way to watch videos from the BBC News website in Linux, and I'd given up, then I hear about this and I managed to get it working! So I thought I'd pass it on...

The BBC News website was set up before Adobe's Flash Video became the de facto web standard for video play it is today. As a result, the videos are available in two formats: Windows Media Player and Real Player. Now, Windows Media Player isn't available for Linux, but Real Player is, so we have to use that. However, it doesn't seem to include a proper plugin for Firefox so it won't display in the browser, and when you try opening it in the standalone player, it plays without sound, which is extremely annoying!

But, with a little bit of work, you can get it working. First of all, you need to install Real Player 10. If you've added Medibuntu as shown in my previous post, it can be installed from there. I actually installed it using Linspire's CNR service (I promise I'll show you how to set that up sometime soon!), but it doesn't matter where you get it form. To install it from Medibuntu, open a terminal and enter the following:

sudo apt-get install realplay

As usual, apt-get will download and install Real Player 10.

Now, you need to add the Firefox extension MediaPlayerConnectivity (unfortunately you need to be using Firefox to be able to get this working, although it's possible Flock might work as some extensions work with it). Grab this from the link and wait for Firefox to install it, then restart. You'll go through a very quick wizard - just make sure it detects Real Player and sets it as the default application for RealMedia, Windows Media, QuickTime etc.
Once that's done, head to the BBC News website (or whatever other website you wish to view the video content on). Once you find a video you want to watch, DON'T left-click on it as usual. Right-click, and select either Open in New Window or Open in New Tab. The reason is that you need this to open in a full window to work properly.

It should now look something like this:


Look for the "+" sign in the top-right hand corner of the player's frame and click on it to open the MediaPlayerConnectivity toolbar (or go to View>Sidebar>MediaPlayerConnectivity in Firefox). This sidebar will give details of all media links on the page. Just click on the one you want, and it should now open in Real Player, with sound and everything! You may need to refresh the page to find it, but I have found it generally works pretty well.

I know, it's a bit fiddly, but it's good to finally be able to watch news articles on my favourite OS!

Restricted Formats

Due to licensing restrictions, in some countries (most notably the United States), it's not possible for free Linux distributions such as Ubuntu to offer many popular proprietary media formats such as MP3 and Adobe Flash Video 'out-of-the-box'. Distributions which are sold commercially, such as Linspire or Xandros, can offer these preinstalled because the purchase price includes a license to use them. Because Ubuntu is free, this option isn't available, so Ubuntu comes without the codecs (short for coder and decoder) necessary to support these formats. For more details, check out this link.
Fortunately, there is a way around this. There are still many countries where it is legal to use these codecs (for instance, anywhere in the European Union), so it is possible to install these quickly and easily. But if you're unsure, check out your country's legislation to make sure you're allowed to install this.
All you need to do is install a metapackage called ubuntu-restricted-extras (or for Kubuntu users, kubuntu-restricted-extras, or in Xubuntu, xubuntu-restricted-extras). You can open Synaptic or Adept Package Manager and find it in there, or you can go to the command line and enter the following:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

This installs the Java Runtime Environment (including a browser plugin so you can run Java applets in your browser), Adobe Flash Player (so you can watch YouTube), MP3 playback and recording, and DVD playback. The reason there are different metapackages for the different Ubuntu versions is that they have different applications installed and it includes MP3 playback for different applications.

I actually found that in Kubuntu an extra step was needed as DVD support wasn't enabled after I installed kubuntu-restricted-extras (I don't know if the same applies in Ubuntu). What you have to do is enter the following on the command line:

sudo usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

This runs a shell script (a type of program) which adds DVD support. After I ran this, DVD's worked fine in the Kaffeine media player. If you've followed the above instructions in Ubuntu or Xubuntu and DVD playback still doesn't work, try this and it should sort it out.

One other thing the kubuntu-restricted-extras metapackage seems to leave out according to apt-get is the msttcorefonts package. This package is present in ubuntu-restricted-extras and xubuntu-restricted-extras, but apparently is not in kubuntu-restricted-extras. Basically, this package consists of the fonts you see in Microsoft Windows such as Arial, Helvetica, etc. So it's not essential, but still a good idea to have. So just open Konsole (or whatever other method you're using to access the command line) and enter the following:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

You should now have the fonts you're used to from Windows available, so you can set your web browser to use them by default, which will make things look a bit more familiar!

I know this seems like a lot of hassle, but believe me, there are good legal reasons not to distribute Ubuntu with these restricted formats installed. There are other ways to get around the issue, though. Linux Mint is a Linux distribution which is based on Ubuntu, but takes a slightly different tack when dealing with the issue of restricted formats. Linux Mint has two versions, a Main edition for downloading in countries where it's legal to use these restricted formats, and a Light edition for countries where this is illegal. The Main edition includes these restricted formats so that they work 'out-of-the-box', whereas the Light edition lacks these. If you really don't want the hassle of dealing with installing support for restricted formats yourself (but honestly, it's not that hard), then Linux Mint makes an excellent alternative to Ubuntu, and is similar enough that much of what I discuss in this blog still applies.