libtotem-complex-plugin interferes with RealPlayer's Mozilla plugin

[Umakanth Puppala]

Binary package hint: totem-gstreamer-firefox-plugin

This issue with an x86 install of Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Firefox 3b5. The issue is with Totem's browser plugin (libtotem-complex) interfering with RealPlayer's Mozilla plugin (nphelix.so):

The packaging of Firefox plugins from my install is such that the plugins are picked up from /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins (not sure why this is the case). One of those plugins is the following

* libtotem-complex-plugin.so

From http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/totem/trunk/browser-plugin/README.browser-plugin?view=markup, the complex plugin for Totem handles "audio/x-pn-realaudio". From my experience this causes two problems:

1. The complex plugin along with the other default installation settings / choices for Ubuntu 8.04 results in RTSP content not playing. Please see attached script/log for more information as to what happens when I try to play content from this test page: http://helixqa.helixcommunity.org/HC_JSAPI/index.php

The key issue is ** Message: IsSchemeSupported scheme 'rtsp': no but I have gstreamer0.10-plugins-good installed (not sure if anything else is required for RTSP playback)

2. The second and more annoying issue is that this plugin interferes with RealPlayer's mozilla plugin (nphelix.so). When RealPlayer is installed and configured, this results in Firefox picking up both libtotem-complex-plugin.so and nphelix.so for the same MIME type, Firefox prioritizes handling of audio/x-pn-realaudio to the Totem complex plugin and as a result playback doesn't happen (see issue 1 above). The workaround is to navigate to the directory where Firefox picks up its plugins from (/usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins in this case) and remove references/soft links to the totem complex plugin.

Doing that enables Firefox to turn over the mimetype handling to RealPlayer's plugin and all works as expected.

The problem here is the default Totem installation / configuration doesn't work for RTSP and worse RealPlayer's plugin is overridden. I am not sure how Firefox prioritizes handling of MIME types when it finds multiple plugins that can handle the same type but I do know for a fact that in Fedora 9 a similar situation ends in RealPlayer handling the audio/x-pn-realaudio every single time.

Gstreamer plugins version: gstreamer0.10-plugins-good
RealPlayer: RealPlayer 11 GOLD (11.0.0.4028)
Totem: 2.22.1

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, there is already some other bugs on the topic and that's a firefox or xulrunner issue, it should select the better plugin or let the user select this one

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 07:58:39AM -0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> thank you for your bug report, there is already some other bugs on the
> topic and that's a firefox or xulrunner issue, it should select the
> better plugin or let the user select this one
>
> ** Changed in: xulrunner-1.9 (Ubuntu)
> Sourcepackagename: totem => xulrunner-1.9
>
 affects ubuntu/xulrunner-1.9
 title "Allow users to configure/select plugins for individual mime-types [was: libtotem-complex-plugin interferes with RealPlayer's Mozilla plugin]"
 status confirmed
 importance wishlist

there should be a upstream bug in bugzilla.mozilla.org already - pretty
sure. please find it ;)

 affects xulrunner
 status incomplete

 - Alexander

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

This package has been removed from Ubuntu. Closing all related bugs.