Gxine crashing Firefox in pup 400 Dingo

[drewmeister]

For a while, not long, Firefox was asking what to use. It doesn't ask anymore. Since I installed mplayer it will sometimes start, usually for .asx (Windoze) streams.

Anyone else seen this sort of trouble?

[disciple]

You might need to clarify the problem - if I understand correctly, it is that embedded video in Firefox gets opened by Gxine, crashing Firefox, and you want to use Mplayer instead.
If so, you just need to delete the Gxine browser plugin - it may be somewhere like ~/.mozilla/plugins, or maybe /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins or /usr/lib/firefox/plugins or some other similar place.
And to use Mplayer instead, you need to install the mplayer plugin, but presumably you have it if .asx links are opening in it - do you mean they are playing embedded properly in the page, or in a separate mplayer window?

[drewmeister]

Thanks for commenting. This is the second time attempting to reply, here's why. When I click a Winamp stream link Gxine (plugin) starts, about half the time it reports "xine engine failed to start," and the other half of the time it plays fine for about two or three minutes, then it crashes Firefox, taking X with it.

If I start a Realplayer stream Mplayer starts, then stops in less than a minute with no messages. An asx gets Mplayer and works great as you described, in a Firefox window/tab.

Reading your post I ran find /usr -name '*xine*' and got just about 120 files/dirs listed. Running find on the root dir yielded .gzine, .xine, and .config/rox.sourceforge.net/OpenWith/gxine. I'm not quite sure where to go or what to do next.

Just checked the version of Gxine installed on this Puppy 400 Dingo, it's 0.5.9. Maybe that's the problem? Should I try uninstalling that and installing version 0.4.9?

[disciple]

It might be interesting to know if an older Gxine works, but if you have Mplayer, you might as well use it instead.
If you want to delete the gxine plugin like I suggested, you can go in Firefox to [url]about:plugins[/url], and it will tell you the filename of the plugins, so that should help you find it.
about:plugins will also tell you whether you have the mplayerplugin installed. If you do, the player would usually be actually embedded in the web page, not opened in a separate tab like you describe, (although links for files that aren't embedded sometimes open in a separate tab).