[Sugar-devel] Installing gstreamer media codecs on XO-1

[David Leeming]

I have tried to install media codecs on an XO-1 running 11.3.0 so that we
can play FLV video files directly (from a flashdrive, school server or
network location)., in either Sugar or GNOME. 

I had trouble getting it work using the instructions at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/GStreamer#Totem_plugin - I think it is outdated. 

After some research and trial and error (lots!!) I have it working, some
using XO-1 may find useful 

The below works on an XO-1 running 11.3.0 freshly installed. It works in
Gnome using Totem/Movie Player and in Sugar using Jukebox Activity. It plays
mp3 audio and FLV video OK (such as the Khan Academy collection, which we
have loaded on the school servers in project schools)  

We also add the Flash plug in for the browser and disable "click to view".
This allows embedded flash animations and FLV videos accessed with Browse,
Youtube, etc to play with good performance. Note that Flash version 11 is
much better than v10. 

So bringing it all together, I reproduced the above using the following. 
- XO-1 running 11.3.0, fresh install
- In Gnome view in a terminal, as su 
- wireless Internet connection 

yum localinstall --nogpgcheck
http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noa
rch.rpm
http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stab
le.noarch.rpm

yum install -y gstreamer-plugins-ugly

yum install -y gstreamer-ffmpeg

rm /home/olpc/Activities/Browse.activity/agent-stylesheet.css 

rm /home/olpc/Activities/Browse.activity/clickToView.xml 

navigate to the flash rpm and run 

rpm -Uhv flash.rpm

where flash.rpm is the Flash verion 11 RPM for Linux 32 bit from Adobe. 

Questions
1. Is the above the right way to do it, if someone with more Fedora
experience than I can verify..
2. In our narrowband countries it takes an hour and downloads a lot per
laptop, this is unworkable in PNG with large numbers of XOs and where the
bandwidth is so expensive and unreliable. Isn't there a way to do this
offline with a download, something we can run on a flashdrive?
3. is the update step above necessary (it requires downloading 33MB) 
4. In doing the above am I violating a ton of licenses?


David Leeming
Solomon Islands Rural Link 
www.rurallink.com.sb