Opera is a wonderful, fast browser that, in concert with its in-built email client uses less resources than most other browser-email combos. It has many cool features other browsers do not have. Unfortunately though, the mplayer plugin for Opera in Linux rarely works properly (not just in VectorLinux but most other distros also). I have tried re-compiling and re-installing that plugin for Opera with no success. After much research on the Opera Forums it appears the easiest way around the issue (at the moment) is to use mozplugger rather than mplayer-plugin. Mozplugger will launch external programs to handle any file type which you might click in a browser. This is slightly different to the way the plugin is swallowed by the browser window - but it in fact gives you more control over the media.
Here is the procedure:
cd ~
wget http://mozplugger.mozdev.org/files/mozplugger-1.8.0.tar.gz
tar xzvf mozplugger-1.8.0.tar.gz
cd mozplugger-1.8.0
make linux
su (enter root password)
cp mozplugger-controller mozplugger-helper /usr/bin
cp mozplugger.so /usr/lib/opera/plugins
cp mozpluggerrc /etc
rm /usr/lib/opera/plugins/mplayer*
exit
Now reload Opera. Go to Tools, Preferences, Advanced, Content, PlugIn-Options and make sure you have only mozplugger and flash plugins listed there. You should be ready to go now.
To enhance your Opera experience with mozplugger consider editing the /etc/mozpluggerrc configuration file. There is a man page here:
http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man7/mozplugger.7.html . Most things are well taken care of but you might want to add xpdf and kpdf for PDF file viewers and you might also want to add your other preferences for specific applications to launch for specific file types. The default is reasonable.
Lastly there are a number of websites that provide real media files only (the BBC being one of them). You should consider installing Real Player (
http://www.real.com/linux/ ) as MPlayer sometimes works OK with these and sometimes not.
