Maya Browser Plugins

[GaryN]

Hi all, I'm a novice Linux user, have had some experience mainly with Ubuntu. I have been installing Ubuntu 10.04 on some friends computers as it does everything they need and gets them away from MS and all the anti-virus problems. I recenly tried Mint Maya on my own system, and I really like it and am considering putting it on further friends computers to replace 10.04 LTS when it is no longer supported.
My only beef so far is that when I click on any streaming feeds from my browser (I have tried a few browsers), the default player, say for an ASX file, a media player opens, MPlayer I think, I get a bar at the bottom of the screen showing the controls and a cache loading indicator. The cache stops at 12 or 13%, and then nothing. I have looked as deep as I can and don't see an answer and suspect there is a configuration file somewhere that I need to edit, but that's just a guess, so any advice from the forum members would be appreciated. As a work around, I installed RadioTray and pasted the media source URLs in, and they play fine, so the problem is with the plugins or their configuration. I think.
Thanks!

[xenopeek]

Can you give an example URL? Being able to reproduce your problem will help others help you

[GaryN]

Can you give an example URL? Being able to reproduce your problem will help others help you

Hi Vincent,
Digging a little deeper...
I had installed Chromium and though that might be the problem, so did a clean install, flash works but is using the older version and not the 11.2 version. I went to rense.com/listen and there are a number of choices for streams. The asx still starts loading and caches, up to 19% if I leave it long enough, but never stars playing. I tried m3u and pls and ram and different players initialise but never load content. I've messed with disabling the plugins in the Firefox plugin manager, and get a window asking what I want to do, save or run, but there are no programs listed in the window for which program to use to run.
Again, if I copy the stream URL and paste it into a player it works fine, so its something to do with the plugins, but I don't know where to go from here. Hope you have some words of advice! I'll keep messing in the meanwhile...
Ta.

[xenopeek]

I don't think a newer plugin will help. I can't get it to load beyond 14% here (from this link http://www.renseradio.com/listenlive.htm). Though the rense.com website has some text showing they are active in 2012, everything else on the website looks severely outdated and from late last century. I guess they've never updated the technology they use (the website refers to WinAmp 2, which was released in 1998), and are using some archaic format that isn't well supported on Linux?

[GaryN]

Hi Vincent,
The Rense site might look outdated, but it is a very popular site for alternative news, one of the biggest on the net.
(And I don't care for the lasted razamataz 'look' to web sites, it's the content that I'm interested in. I still work on the KISS principle, I use a text editor and about 12 html tags for any pages I create!)
I only chose that site because it has a choice of formats to try out, and none of them will work from within Firefox. It's the same at other sites too. The Winamp 2 link was put there because people were having problems with the original link. For now I have pasted my favourite streaming audio links into Radio Tray, it works fast and never has any problems with drop-outs or quitting or anything.
When I get more time I'll try and get to the bottom of the problem, but I'm not going to install Maya on any more friends machines until everything works as it should, it is frustrating for the 2 users I did put it on, and I have had to tell them how I get around the problem. I also tried Maya on 3 of my own computers, and the same problem persists, so it's not hardware related.
Little things are sent to try us...

[xenopeek]

if you have other websites as examples, please share. This may be worth looking into.

For earlier versions of Linux Mint I used to have a problem with streaming audio for Apple format streams, and needed to replace the browser plugin with another to make it work properly. On Linux Mint 13 it is since working fine for me, but it may be that some plugins work better than others for certain streaming audio formats.

I used to have to install the package totem-mozilla, and then start Firefox, go to Add-ons > Plugins and disable the QuickTime Plug-in from Gecko Media Player. totem-mozilla is at least installed by default on my Linux Mint 13 installation, so you may try to disable the Gecko Media Player version of the QuickTime Plug-in so that Firefox will use the Totem version of QuickTime Plug-in.

[Platy]

I can confirm the problem described by GaryN, the original poster. Some other streaming websites that show the same problem are

http://www.koop.org - select the "Android/Others" player option
http://www.the1920snetwork.com - select an "MP3 Server" option

In Firefox, I can disable the Gecko Media Player plugin and configure VLC as a helper application to process Shoutcast playlist (*.pls) files. Unfortunately, the Chrome and Chromium browsers don't seem to provide an obvious way to configure helper applications.