Arch Linux

Playing embedded movies via Konqueror's embedded multimedia plugin does not work at all as of KDE 3.5.x, and has not worked since (at least) 3.4. Witness, for example, what happens when one tries to play Apple's trailer for The Da Vinci Code - a Quicktime trailer which the plugin should be quite capable of playing:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/da_vinci_code/large.html

If you're using Konqueror without Kaffeine, you'll see a white space with controls underneath. Clicking the "Play" button will not cause any change; you'll get a message at the bottom of the Konqueror window saying "Playing [movie's url] - 00:00/00:00", and that's it. There will be no buffering and no playing; if you leave it like this for several minutes and come back later, nothing whatsoever will have happened. The link below is to a screenshot of the plugin in (in)action on my machine:

http://img428.imageshack.us/img428/5579/snapshot6sa.jpg

As you can see, it's not playing. What the screenshot doesn't tell you is that it's been in this state for about five minutes as of right now.

What's interesting about this particular problem is that it applies only to movies - and applies to ALL movies, encoded in ANY format. However, the embedded media plugin has no trouble whatsoever playing MP3s, WAVs, and other sound files.

Furthermore, Noatun and Kaboodle have no trouble playing movies, as far as I can tell, so I'm fairly perplexed about the ineffectual nature of the Konqueror plugin.

(It should be noted that the plugin definitely worked in KDE 3.2, and was capable of playing just about any embedded movie you threw at it. I wonder: could this be the same strange problem that afflicted the Totem plugin until recently? Is this upstream, or is it an Arch problem like the Totem bug was?)