How to watch Charlottetown City Council on a Mac

One of the outcomes of the erstwhile “smart communities” project in Charlottetown is streaming video of City Council meetings. Unfortunately the technology used for the broadcasting is proprietary Microsoft Windows Media-based, which, among other things, makes it very difficult for non-Windows users to watch the videos. But there are ways.

On an Intel Mac (i.e. a relatively modern Mac, not an older Power PC-based one) here’s what you need to do:

1. Install rev11 of MPlayer for OS X. Note that this isn’t the current version of MPlayer for OS X, it’s the previous revision. But it’s the only one that will work, at least for the time-being.
2. From the main MPlayer site, download and install the “Binary Codec Packages” for “Mac OS X x86” – right now the link is this one.
3. Use MPlayer to open the links to videos you find here – like mms://142.176.19.86/Archive/Dec09.wmv, for example.

The video and audio quality are atrocious – it’s not clear how much of this is due to MPlayer and how much of it is due to the quality of the original broadcast. Oh, and you can neither rewind nor fast forward. Here’s what it looks like when it’s working: