How to watch our clips in Linux

How to watch our clips in Linux

Posted in News by Julik in May 2008

A short explanation: our clips are encoded in H.264, a common modern format for media online. It can be played with many players on Linux (like VLC if you download the clips first), but for viewing it inline we recommend QuickTime from Apple. By a twist of faith Quicktime is not available for Linux, so you need to substitute it with another plugin that can display our videos inline (within pages).

The plugin that has been tested and works is totem, and here are the instructions on how to install it. I will assume that you are familiar with typing stuff in the Terminal and the like.

First of all, you will need to be running a recent Linux distribution (like Ubuntu 8 Hardy Heron). Older distributions do not always provide the needed version of the x264 library that we are going to need. If you are running Ubuntu you will need to add ubuntu-multiverse to your repository list, like explained in this article.

Afterwards you will need to install the following packages (I am giving an example with apt-get command for Ubuntu, other distributions might have different package names).

  $ sudo apt-get install x264
  $ sudo apt-get install lib264-57
  $ sudo apt-get install totem-gstreamer

Use a Mozilla-based browser like Firefox or Epiphany and, if all worked, you should see our clips in all their glory. Have fun and if you are having problems shoot me an e-mail