I spent over a half hour today fighting with Linux trying to get it to play the BBC's video of Bush's escape. It turns out for Linux you need to first download the .asx file that their internal pages point you to (figuring out that URL is a pain in itself). Open up the asx, and find the mms:// URL within that and then give that URL to mplayer to play.

At that point mplayer still couldn't really handle it so I encoded it to raw video and then in order to allow for Windows compatibility I then re-encoded that to msmpeg4v2/pcm. This took it down to 1.8MB and should make it universally watchable. Undoubtedly, given the mess of Mac/Windows/Linux video codecs, it probably still won't play on someone's setup. What a pain, though the BBC could do better.

Here's the torrent: pep_delicious-bush_escape.torrent

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:14 AM in general | Comments (0)