Ages ago British Pathé opened up its archive of newsreel footage. As for the video format, it is all in WMV and QuickTime. So the stills are accessible, but the videos require proprietary codecs. Sue reminded me about the new Fluendo WMV codecs, so we had a go with the free preview footage.
Unfortunately while the sound worked fine, there was no video at all using Totem. We tried xine for comparision and it gave some video but with so many artifacts it was unwatchable.
I reported the problem in Fluendo’s Trac system, but haven’t had any response yet.
Perhaps I should have gone for the i386 version instead of the x86_64 version…