Wednesday, May 20, 2009

You can't get there from here.

Mass. Pike urging drivers to check new Web cams.
Nice, eh. Check your computer to see if there's a traffic muck-up at the Weston tolls as we saw back in April.
Well, if you're not a Windows user, your only way to see what's going on out on the Pike is to get in your car and drive there. The Pike's camera site requires Windows Media Player. If you are (as I am) running Linux (dunno about MacOS), you can't see the camera's images.
The Mass. Pike chose a proprietary format to display public information. 


There are some work-arounds, but they're not pretty. For example:

tom@tom:~$ winecfg
wine: creating configuration directory '/home/tom/.wine'...
fixme:midi:OSS_MidiInit Synthesizer supports MIDI in. Not yet supported.
wine: '/home/tom/.wine' created successfully.

Now select the Audio tab and set your audio driver, I use OSS and set Hardware Acceleration to "Emulation" If you want to run Wine in a virtual desktop now is a good time to select the Graphics tab and set the size of your preference.

At this time we also need to set quartz.dll and devenum.dll to "Native" this is done in the libraries tab, after you have done this select apply and then ok.

Now you will need to get a native windows quartz and devenum dll and place them in .wine/drive_c/windows/system32 and register the dlls with:

tom@tom:~$ regsvr32 "C:\windows\system32\quartz.dll"
fixme:midi:OSS_MidiInit Synthesizer supports MIDI in. Not yet supported.
Successfully registered DLL C:\windows\system32\quartz.dll
tom@tom:~$ regsvr32 "C:\windows\system32\devenum.dll"
fixme:midi:OSS_MidiInit Synthesizer supports MIDI in. Not yet supported.
Successfully registered DLL C:\windows\system32\devenum.dll
tom@tom:~$

Now we need to install some codecs for Windows Media Player ...


Source: Windows Media Player 9 & 10 on Linux with Wine
You can say that Linux makes things needlessly difficult and I won't argue too strenuously. Let's not forget, however, that the Mass. Pike chose a proprietary format for public information.

1 comment:

Jeff Barnard said...

Don't worry, Karl, it didn't work on my quadcore running Vista with the lastest Windows Media Player, either. Not only is it proprietary, they haven't figured out how to get it to work yet.

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