Missing controls on Mozilla VLC plugin

Hi, you reported this bug a while ago.
Is this issue still a problem for you?
Have you tried with later Ubuntu releases?

//magnus

Sorry for the delay: I have been away on business.

On 64-bit Intrepid 8.10 the vlc plugin doesn't seem to work at all. With the seamonkey browser the plugin element is not displayed on the page; nothing is visible, not even a blank rectangle. With the firefox browser, a media player element appears, and has controls, but does not play. It is completely inactive; it does not respond to anything.

A possibly related problem is another bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/295926 with the Adobe flash player plugin. It works for a while, then after some random period no plugin element is displayed.

The original bug as described 2007-12-31 is still present on 32-bit Hardy 8.04.1.

Hi,

the fact that vlc-plugin does not respond is probably bug#212033. I also have this problem.

Anyway, i let this bug stay open so if anyone can confirm this with gutsy or hardy or whatever, we can do some troubleshooting.

//magnus

I can confirm that this is still an issue with mozilla-plugin-vlc 9.4 in Ubuntu Intrepid.

According to this mailing list thread, it seems that controls for the Mozilla plugin is yet to be written, or that a HTML page must explicitly include code to allow the Mozilla plugin to display appropriate controls:
http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/2007-October/035322.html

In the meantime, you can use keyboard controls: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=535636
But beware that the plugin responds *very slowly* to the input. Pausing a video takes a second or two. Seeking forward/reverse can take more than several seconds, or even just freeze the screen and not respond at all. I've given up on the Mozilla vlc plugin, and have resorted to just downloading the media to play it using the GUI vlc instead (there are some Firefox add-ons which allow this, like DownloadHelper).

Not a satisfactory situation, but I think this is a case of Do-It-Yourself.

Many thanks for the update on this problem. In fact, I have been using the File->Open Network Stream... method as one way around the problem, except this doesn't always work. It is also often not possible to download media files to play locally. At least now I understand why the controls are missing, and have some possible solutions, albeit imperfect.

Thanks again for your help.

Same Behaviour in Jaunty 64bit - Plays but no controls at all.

I think there has been enough feedback on this to mark it confirmed, but it will probably need to be relegated to upstream until VLC devs implement plugin controls.

Thanks to samjh for confirming the bug. Thanks also to kylea: I also observe that the bug does still exist for the VLC Mozilla plugin on 64-bit Jaunty. In other respects such as playback quality, and ability to play embedded video, the VLC Mozilla plugin is, in my opinion, better than the other options, so it would be good if this problem could be solved. Thanks again to all concerned.

This bug is STILL present in Karmic.

There has never been controls with the VLC Mozilla plugin. This is not a bug report, it's a feature request.

Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote, "There has never been controls with the VLC Mozilla plugin [...]" This is not true: the bug was not present in Fedora 7, which I used to use several years ago. I got fed up with all the other problems with Fedora, and switched to Ubuntu 7.10, and since then VLC Mozilla plugin has not worked. I am now using Ubuntu 9.10. Moreover, it is obviously silly that there are no controls, since this plugin is not much use without them, so it should be considered a bug.

Same problem under Archlinux vlc-plugin 1.0.5-5 and Opera 10.10

No controls at all

Since geckomediaplayer can't handle apple.com trailers I thought I'd give the vlc plugin a try but w/o controls it's pretty much useless as well. Sometimes linux is really annoying.

I was wanting to try vlc's mozilla plugin so I might be able to have more control over youtube video playback. What a surprise to see that there are no controls whatsoever.

I recently installed Ubuntu 10.4 LTS. Using VLC and the mozilla-plugin-vlc 1.0.6 inside Opera (and sometimes Firefox). No controls. As alternative one might use the totem-plugin (goes with Totem Movie Player), which so far hasn't given me any headaches and everything works fine.

I just uninstalled totem from Jaunty because VLC usually gives me more control, what a surprise when I found the VLC plugin gives me NO control! If only there was a way from the VLC plugin to open the video in the full VLC...

VLC never EVER has had controls in its own windows. VLC is designed such that it provides a Javascript API so that web developpers can add their controls wherever and however they want on their web page. It's always been like this and it predates the YouTube-driven Flash video player frenzy.

Now, if you want controls, show me the code. This is not going to happen by me-too-ing this bug over and over and over.

Marking this Triaged as we have an upstream bug.