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Heroine Virtual has an open source MPEG-2 encoder.

3. Of all the groups working on a nice MPEG-4 codec, we have seen many die, fizzle, or simply lie. OpenCodex.com is pretty much off the face of the planet and now their website is just some virtual hosting site. 3ivx has said they have a supperior product, and that it will be open source, so far both have been false. That leaves it to ProjectMayo -- the group started by the creator of DivX. They haven't released anything yet but they sure seem to be the most professional. Perhaps we can appeal to them to become open source.

You seem to have missed Heroine Virtual as an opensource alternative. They are the programmers behind XMovie, Broadcast 2000, and a new MPEG library that rivals MPEG-4 in it's bitrates and quality. Currently they are only supporting *nix OSes, but the program and lib sources are there if anyone wants to port them to other desktop dominant systems.

Xiphophorus

and

Fiasco!

As far as syncing with Linux goes, all Palm models are able to do this using pilotlink and if you'd like a GUI i recommend jpilot. IIRC the Rex 6000 used a scaled down version of WinCE, there is no way this is going to sync with linux. And the range of applications for PalmOS is much greater than that of the Rex 6000.

This is not news, it's already been on Slashdot I guess. This codec is from AT&T's labs. For a really new image codec, check Ulli's website: http://ulli.linuxave.net/fiasco/. It would be nice to add FIASCO! support to the GIMP and gdk-pixbuf for example...

xanim doesn't fully support MPEG-1 - it's not buggy (not that xanim doesn't have bugs in other formats) but just that it only supports MPEG key frames, not intermediate ones.

Try mtv, smpeg, xmovie, LAMP..

If you want decent fullscreen support on a slower speed machine (as you would get in Windows), then you need XFree 4.0 with the Xv extension and a player that supports it. Xv supports shared memory transfer of YUV images (MPEG decoder output) from user space directly to the graphics card memory, and uses the graphics card's hardware YUV-to-RGB conversion and scaling support.

BTW, there's only a few cards (such as Matrox g400) that have Xv driver support yet.

If you don't have Xv support, then second best would be a player like LAMP that supports DGA (direct video memory access under XFree).

xmovie

LAMP

avifile may read divx's, but it certainly doesn't work for all windows video CODECs. Have you ever tried getting it to use one other than those it comes bundled with - I hav't been able to get a single additional one to work - then all fail in different ways.

Still, if you do want to use avifile, aviplay and XMPS are not the best players. Try LAMP or XTheatre instead.

There are better options for MPEG also. SMPEG only works for MPEG-1 (as does mtvp). For MPEG-2, try xmovie, xine, or the VideoLan client.

There's also at least 3 Open Source divx (i.e. MPEG-4) CODEC efforts that I'm aware of - I submitted the story yesterday, but it was rejected.

Next, I've got some more 'specific' apps to what I do, specifically, the Programmers Calculator, which has great hex-bin-dec conversion and some other nice features for doing computer-stuff (seems to have gone missing, but there are other similar calculators). I also have to report my hours working on various projects, so Titrax (http://www.titrax.com/) is a nice app for keeping track of that without too much effort.

Personally, I like apps that allow me to sync with other data sources. Anybody know of an good way to sync databases to a palm app using a linux box (maybe a plugin for jpilot?

- Mike

I've got a Sony TRV-310 (~US$800 last Christmas) and and an ADS Pyro Firewire card (US$70 a couple months ago). The nice thing about the camera is it can play and digitize even old 8mm camcorder tapes.

See the DVgrab links page for info on exactly what software and hardware are needed/available.

There's one open-source video editing app (Broadcast2000) and one commercial (MainActor) for Linux that I know of.

Note that such camcorders store and transmit using the DV standard, which is compressed to ~3.7MB/sec. There are also raw video cameras available, though I don't know if they are supported yet. For scientific work you may need a raw camera, for personal or broadcast work DV is ample.

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I'm getting tired of repeating this all the time, but if you want to read DVDs under Linux, grab a copy of xmovie. It comes with DeCSS integrated. And it works wonderfully (though it's a pain to compile). The author does not seem to have been harrassed by the MPAA yet (he did remove DeCSS from xmovie at some point, but then he put it back again).

If you're not happy about the legal shit, just ignore it.

though I still want an open source player to come to fruit

Try xmovie. It is really nice, it is Open Source, and it comes with DeCSS integrated. Beware, however, that it is really a pain to compile (and there is nothing remotely resembling documentation).

...merely distributing css-descramble.c without the required header files and without the code that performs the DVD drive authentication and challenge. Hey, haven't you heard of tar | gzip | mimencode?

Look, either it's a symbolic measure of protest and civil disobedience: but then, it's much more fun to have tee-shirts and MP3's and images of the DeCSS source.

Or it's destined to be actually useful. But then, did you ever notice that the wonderful xmovie program comes with DeCSS included (though you'll have to recompile it yourself; which is a pretty difficult task, in fact). I haven't tried out version 1.5.1 for the moment, but I use version 1.4 to read my DVD's and it works marvelously. No messing around with css-cat's strange options. Brutal seeking works fine. This program is beautiful.

So instead of distributing just one isolated file which is worthless alone, distribute the entire xmovie source code. All right, it's a bit large - but it's worth it.

You'll probably want to take that database migration slowly. I hear changing DB engines can be a pain in the ass. You could try making your apache CGI (or whatever) apps with MS SQL Server with ODBC Socket Server. At work we have apache with mod perl and CGI apps with an SQL server backend with this program.

Good point. Personally, I've been thinking of using some free tools (POVray and the mpeg_movie suite) to try and create a short (<2 min) video clip that shows Linux and open-source software in a positive light. This clip could be broadcast on Public Access TV, various websites, and possibly major networks if someone fronts the cash. (*cough* RedHat, SuSE) Is anyone working on a project like this, and could they use some help? I'm willing to contribute.

This is probably necessary, because people in general pay more attention to pretty pictures than to well-thought-out arguments. Sad but true; propaganda for the masses is one of the areas where Linux/BSD/Plan 9 have not concentrated their efforts, and it's showing. Let's see if we can change that.

Disclaimer: I'm slightly drunk, but I'll stand by this post, as it's an important issue and one that needs to be addressed.

You didn't do a very good search, as I got two hits, the second one being FIASCO!

greetings, eMBee.
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That should be good.
Joseph Elwell.

mp3stereo

Knight Rider MP3 (I know, corny name)

ELMP or here

HUH? I don't get this comment....

Go here:
http://publicsource.apple.com/projects/streaming/

Darwin Streaming Server 2.0.1 includes minor performance and reliability enhancements. Download compiled binaries below (requires acceptance of the APSL):

FreeBSD 3.4 (server and proxy)

Red Hat Linux 6.2 (server and proxy)

Solaris 7 (server and proxy)

Windows NT Server/Windows 2000 Server (server)

This is equivalent to QuickTime Streaming Server 2.0.1 for Mac OS X Server.

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Maybe I'm being dumb here (is the poster just talking about playback?) but you clearly can serve Quicktime content without proprietary hardware and software solutions.

Sure, you need to be able to encode it first, but the Sorenson codec is a whole other problem. If we had that then these guys:

Quicktime for Linux would be having a much easier time of it!

What's really needed is a shit hot open source video compression codec. Anyone know of such a beast?

AndyT

The guys at Heroine Virtual have developed XMovie with deCSS built in. Although the current version does not have it (due to GPL violations), the older ones do. The average slashdotter should be able to find older version. XMovie can play MPEG2 video, and with the deCSS in it, it can decode DVD too.

I DO NOT RECCOMMEND THAT ANYONE USE SOFTWARE THAT VIOLATES A LICENSING AGREEMENT


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The guys at Heroine Virtual have developed XMovie with deCSS built in. Although the current version does not have it (due to GPL violations), the older ones do. The average slashdotter should be able to find older version. XMovie can play MPEG2 video, and with the deCSS in it, it can decode DVD too.

I DO NOT RECCOMMEND THAT ANYONE USE SOFTWARE THAT VIOLATES A LICENSING AGREEMENT


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http://www.linuxave.net offers free hosting to open source projects. I have been happily hosted there for a few months.
However, Sourceforge provides mailing lists, bug tracking, compilation, and other features that Linuxave does not.

ODBC Socket Server easily allows Linux servers to talk to Microsoft Access. There are clients for PHP, Perl, Python, and C++. Its GPL and can be found at http://odbc.linuxave.net.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments about the software.

For starters, a properly designed manual (regardless of whether it's printed, in PDF or HTML or whatever) reduces the need for word-based searching. The theory being that the people writing the documentation break it up into "atomic" pieces, and give each piece a useful title. Then you have an index and glossary which cover all the "jargon" words for your product, along with all the useful or moderately useful terms.

In the event that you want to provide a search capability on your on-line documentation, there are self-contained tools available such as Verity's (closed-source, proprietary) Search 97 CD Web Publisher, which is a self-contained web server and search engine. There is Perlfect Search, which is not stand-alone, but could probably be incorporated into a self-contained documentation server.

Failing all else, you give the customer permission to copy the documentation to their own Intranet site, which will usually have some kind of indexing/searching system available.

IMHO, PDF is the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet/World Wide Web. Here is a format that:

• can't be re-rendered to fit the screen I'm using,
• requires a specific paper size when printing (ie: US documentation usually wants US letter, while British will usually want A4),
• dictates that certain fonts are used,
• looks ugly on screen, and only looks good on paper, because that's what the document was designed for, and
• wastes bandwidth (Internet or Intranet) because you have to download the whole thing to view one page.

One great advantage of XML/HTML documentation is that it can be read using Lynx (after being served up by your web server), or converted to doc format for Newton or Palm devices (or in fact, any format you want).

I think the Geforce support under 3.3.6 will do me very nicely.

The inclusion of Broadcast 2000 (video editing software) is pretty neat... it should be fun to play with, or at least give me some interesting code to read.

Broadcast 2000 Home Page

BROADCAST2000!!

Everything you need to edit stuff from web content to film.

Don't forget the GIMP either. Works great for all sorts of effects if you know a little Perl.

Be sure and check out Sound & MIDI Software For Linux for a whole slew of audio tools.

The makers of Broadcast2000 have some great mpeg-2 encoding tools as well.

Use Linux for your project! It gives you total access to your media, it's stable and cheap. I've been using it to edit my documentary and I'm really happy with it.

It's sad to live in a world where knowing how to

Broadcast2000 is a fine Video/Audio editor for Linux. http://heroine.linuxave.net/

I have actually tried this program now. It is called Broadcast 2000. it is more tailored for Video but it can do DVD-Playback. Edit multiple sound streams merge them and do a lot of REALLY neat stuff.

The interface is a bit kludgy but overall it is a very impressive application.

It is GPL'd and it "could" be better but it performs VERY good.

Here is the linkBroadcast 2000
Give it a try? :-)

Jeremy

System.out.println(ShameLessSelfPromotion);