espn360 in Linux
Seeing as by far the most viewed entry I have on here is the one containing the packages I built for screenlets, I thought I’d let google do its magic again and write a howto for getting espn360 to work in linux.
espn360.com is a site where you can watch live video from all the espn/abc channels. This is particularly great for Saturdays of College Football. It seems these days that pretty much all websites/apps are completely cross platform. However, epsn360 currently only offers their firefox plugin for windows and mac. I have written them saying that both firefox and flash exist for Linux (duh), and it would be trivial to add support (and I recommend you doing the same). However, the point of this article is to show it isn’t to hard to get it working now anyway. I hope this saves someone some time.
The solution to getting espn360 to work is to simply install the windows version (not the native linux version we all use) of Firefox through wine.
I am using Fedora, so I first install wine like this:
yum install wine (as root)
Of course you could also use the gui package manager by selecting – “add and remove programs” from the main menu. Then, download the windows version of firefox from here (2.07 when I wrote this): http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html
Then install it with wine:
wine Firefox\ Setup\ 2.0.0.7.exe (as regular user)
Now that it is install, you will have a new icon on your desktop, or run the new windows firefox with
wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Mozilla\ Firefox/firefox.exe
Head over to espn360.com. It will prompt you to install flash player for your wine setup. Agree, and then it will make you restart firefox. When you restart firefox and get back to espn360.com, click to install the plugin (you will likely have to allow espn360.com to install in firefox by clicking the yellow warning bar above the page). You are now good to go.
I haven’t found any other sites where I would need to do this (again most things are cross platform these days), but it is good to know that there is a relatively simple solution if any more sites have this problem.
December 27th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Thanks, I was able to get it working in crossover office.
I almost had it working in IE6 with cxoffice, but for some reason the IE version of the plugin wouldn’t install.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Yeah!! (Wrings hands)! Nice blog you have here. I’ve enjoyed much reading your last posts. Keep it that way.
June 18th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
To get it working, I had to run wincfg and change the system identification to Windows XP from Windows NT. Initially my wine had no fonts installed, so I had to download the arial font for windows first. Otherwise, thanks a lot for writing this.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
I’ve followed your instructions but when I launch the player, my screen gets all messed up and I have to restart my computer. The audio comes in just fine, but the video doesn’t quite work.
July 15th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Unfortunately, I am away from home for the summer and my internet connection here does not have access to the espn360 service. So, I can’t test it. I will post again when I get back in august. In the meantime, you may want to try different versions of firefox for windows or perhaps a different version of the flash plugin.
September 4th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
When I try it now, the entire screen goes black and I get funky colors. I have to ctrl-backspace to kill X – seems like the move media player was updated and is no longer compatible with wine
September 5th, 2008 at 7:41 am
It is still working with me in Crossover Office 6.2 (which is what I tried it with initially).
Perhaps newer versions of wine broke something.
September 12th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Ok, with the latest versions of wine there is a somewhat unsavory workaround to get this working through xnest that I found at ubuntuforums: (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=823728&page=2)
Do:
Xnest -geometry 1280×720 -ac :2 &
env DISPLAY=:2 /usr/bin/gnome-wm &
env DISPLAY=:2 wine “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe”
March 12th, 2010 at 4:11 am
Your article is amusing! Keep up the good work!
March 14th, 2010 at 10:16 am
Trying doing this, it worked out fine until I went back to espn360, I opened up the video I wanted to watch, and it just sat there with a blank screen. It didn’t ask me to install flash player. You know what yo do?
April 5th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
epn360 finally dropped Move Media Player for vaninall flash. It is now renamed espn3 and works great in Linux. No more need for wine!