[GTALUG] [SOLVED] Playing *.pls files in firefox?

[Walter Dnes]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 07:38:11AM -0500, James Knott wrote
> On 11/17/2014 02:33 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
> >   Showing my age here, I like oldies music.  An interesting site is
> > http://www.fun45s.com/ but firefox won't play it for me.  Fortunately
> > they give the direct stream URL on their homepage.  If I try
> > http://s7.voscast.com:8376 or http://www.fun45s.com/listen.pls in
> > firefox, firefox asks for a .pls handler, and I point it to mpg123.  It
> > doesn't work.  No music.  But if I run mpg123 direcly from the
> > commandline like so...
> >
> > mpg123 http://s7.voscast.com:8376
> >
> > ...it works.  Can I set up firefox to handle pls files direcly, or is
> > there a player that firefox can invoke?
> >
> 
> It works for me in Firefox.  It's currently playing The Four Seasons
> "Let's Hang On".  I didn't do anything to get it to work.

  Thanks for that.  It encouraged me to dig deeper.  I set up a "streams"
profile for internet radio and TV streams.  My "youtube" profile plays
it without any problems but "streams" didn't.  I opened up the "Edit
Preferences" menu on both profiles and stepped through a bunch of items
side-by-each.  I discovered that...

* there were entries for "MP3 audio (streamed)" and "PLS file" in the
  "streams" profile, but no entries in the "youtube" profile

* the "streams" profile somehow had AbiWord associated as the handler
  for "MP3 audio (streamed)".  I *KNOW* that I had been pointing to
  mpg123, so I don't really understand how that happened.

* I changed "Action" to "Always ask", and it now works automatically,
  without even asking.  Go figure.

  I wanted to get rid of the entry entirely, to duplicate the setup in
my "youtube" profile, but I couldn't figure out how to do it from the
menu.  A bit of Google searching turned up...
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/set-how-firefox-handles-different-file-types
which says...

> The Applications panel has limited functionality for editing. You
> can change the action for an existing file type but you cannot add or
> remove file types. Entries are added automatically when you download
> files and select actions for them.

  I wasn't going to accept that.  I closed both browsers ("youtube" and
"streams"), opened up 2 xterms, and dove into the profile directories
for my "streams" and "youtube" profiles.  A bit of grepping showed that
the file "mimeTypes.rdf" in the "streams" profile had a block like so...

  <RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:audio/x-mpegurl"
                   NC:value="audio/x-mpegurl"
                   NC:editable="true"
                   NC:fileExtensions="m3u"
                   NC:description="MP3 audio (streamed)">
    <NC:handlerProp RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:handler:audio/x-mpegurl"/>
  </RDF:Description>

  There was no such entry in the "youtube" mimeTypes.rdf.  I did not
feel comfortable editing the xml file, but I did the next best thing.  I
backed up the "streams" mimeType.rdf, and copied over the version from
my "youtube" profile.  Now everything works.

  This brings up something else I remember about mimeTypes.rdf.  On my
system /usr/bin/gimp is a symlink to /usr/bin/gimp-2-8 and
/usr/bin/gnumeric is a symlink to /usr/bin/gnumeric-1.12.17.  I don't
know if Firefox still does it, but a few years ago I ran into some
"helpful" behaviour, equivalant to "Clippy helpfulness".  If Firefox
asked for a handler, and you pointed it to a file that was a symlink, it
"helpfully" de-referenced the filename.  So if I told it to use
"/usr/bin/gnumeric" for "*.xls", it selected "/usr/bin/gnumeric-1-12-17"
as the handler.  Of course, the next minor version bump update to
gnumeric broke that association.  Just as bad is what happens with sox.
"play" and "rec" are symlinks to sox which does different things and
expects different parameters.  Pointing to "play" or "rec" results in
pointing to "sox".  I ended up manually editing mimeTypes.rdf to point
to the file I actually wanted.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes at waltdnes.org>