Kaffeine and playing files from off the local network

[Duncan]

John Woodhouse posted on Sat, 21 May 2011 08:06:26 -0700 as excerpted:

> Or switch player in the hope that it uses the
> 
> latest way of accessing the files. A catch here is that some such insist
> on downloading the file 1st which defeats the object really. Info is
> scant.

One you might try is vlc -- it stands for video LAN client and has been 
specifically designed for playing stuff served over the network.  I had 
read about it but hadn't actually tried it until recently.  It's middle of 
the road in terms of feature set -- it doesn't have the extreme zoom 
effects that packages like the old kaffeine for kde3 and the newer smplayer 
have, but does have single-frame-advance and etc, that these have but the 
"simple" players like dragonplayer and what is I believe its kpart, built 
into dolphin/gwenview/konqueror, do not have.  

But there are two things I really like about vlc.  One is that sometimes 
smplayer will fail to play video at all, only audio, while restarting the 
same video it might play it fine, and vlc "just works" (as does 
dragonplayer, etc, but only with "controls for dummies").  The other is 
the vlc-based phonon backend, phonon-vlc, as compared to the older and 
often default phonon-xine.  That may be a separate package on top of vlc 
proper, but all the problems I had using the phonon-xine backend, kde 
complaining about the sound card disappearing, etc, simply disappeared 
when I switched to phonon-vlc.

The bottom line is that vlc is mid-line for the number of features, not as 
fancy as some but definitely far above the "controls for dummies" crowd, 
but more importantly, it has a reputation for "just working", and that has 
definitely been my experience.

You can also try the qt4 and mplayer based smplayer.  It's top of the line 
in terms of features, reminding me very much of the kde3 kaffeine, but as 
I said, I've had problems with it sometimes playing sound only on videos I 
know it has the codec for and will at other times play the video for just 
fine.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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