How to add the Audio/Video Property tab to Caja?

Question

By default Caja does not come with the Audio/Video Properties tab that is present in Nautilus since... a very long time.

How can this tab be added?

Answer 1

gnome-mplayer includes an extension for caja since version 1.0.9-2 :

https://code.google.com/p/gnome-mplayer/source/checkout

However, the version of gnome-mplayer-1.0.9-2 that comes from the Ubuntu repositories does not include the caja extension:

/usr/lib/caja/extensions-2.0/libgnome-mplayer-caja-properties-page.so

OR (for amd64):

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/caja/extensions-2.0/libgnome-mplayer-caja-properties-page.so

I suspect that the reason is that when the .DEB was compiled, caja was not installed and thus not detected.

Therefore the only solution is to compile from source or use a deb compiled by someone else: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x340ym3xeyhuosu/gnome-mplayer_1.0.9.2-2_amd64.deb?dl=1 https://www.dropbox.com/s/qm6nkgkaebddtrj/gnome-mplayer_1.0.9-1_i386.deb?dl=1

STEPS to compile:

1. Install dependencies:

Run the following as root:

apt-get build-dep gnome-mplayer
apt-get install make automake
apt-get install svn
apt-get install libcaja-extension-dev

2. Download source code with svn:

svn checkout http://gnome-mplayer.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ gnome-mplayer

3. Compile

The make might complain that it cannot find automake-1.13 when you have automake-1.14 In order to resolve this run the following in the source folder:

aclocal
automake
./configure
make

after this all you need to do is to run: make install OR checkinstall

Finally you might need to also install mplayer if you don't already have it. Restart caja by logout/login or killall caja

Now you should have the property tab. If you don't, check if you can open a movie with gnome-mplayer.

Let me know if you encounter any issues!

UPDATE: referenced dropbox package now installs the dependencies