Slashdot Mirror

You can already get "widescreen" MPEG video on the iPAQ - there are several players including Pocket TV (you can view in landscape mode and turn the device sideways) and rumors of work on a divx port to PocketPC. I love the form factor of my Palm Vx, but there is certainly geek lust for the ability to watch a decoded DVD on my PDA on the commute home. Or even better, decode the MPEG on my Tivo and catch up on those Battlebots episodes on the train.

I'll take what you wrote at face value (Hi Dr Awktagon!) ... "mtv" (here) has a "Play VCD" option on the menus, but I haven't tried it (no VideoCDs to hand).

eg, xtheater, i use it to play all my divx's and asfs.. its avaiable here

and if your wondering, a good mpeg player is mptv, here - the back end thing is free, but the front end is not free, but there is a SDK for it.. so if an opensource person would like to write a descent frontend, thatd be good!

"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk ?"

Unfortunately, neither of these will play the stuff that I really want to see, like the Lord of the Rings Trailer or the D&D movie trailer. I'm forced to fall back to VMWare for that. Damn Quicktime...

Two sources you can check out.... mpeg plugin for xmms and mpegtv's mtv player.

try MpegTV (aka mtv), its commercial (10$) but works great for vcd's

you can find it on www.mpegtv.com

I suggest mtv

I think I agree entirely - especially about the 'marketroids should attract me' view, not the other way round.

Someone needs to sit down and look at the available graphics, audio, streaming and video formats (DVD, anyone? ;) and write a decent killer app, I think. I mean, I've got some large mpegs flying around that I occasionally like to view, and I really hated having to boot windoze to watch them properly. "xanim" really doesn't kick it.
In fact, MpegTV doesn't really kick it unless you renice a few processes up & down, too.

Maybe the problem lies in that while linux is definitely great for being a server, it is also hitting the desktop; and while I don't want an influx of luser newbies wanting it to *be* a desktop OS per-se, I also (a) don't want to run windoze (b) do want to watch my video sources full-screen with decent performance.

So some companies need to open-source their products or at least open the protocols used (I disagree utterly with the "buy it under NDA and do all the linux porting work for Apple quicktime" approach, btw), so we can get on with using them...

Plugger seems to work well in Linux. Instead of being a monolithic multimedia player plugin, it uses xanim and mtv to play video, timidity for MIDI, xmp for mods and so on. It's worth a try.

It's not that they don't want DVD on Linux -- as a matter of fact, DVD has been available on Linux for a while, from MpegTV, and probably others.

Rather, it's open source DVD decryption that's the problem. Security through obscurity... it's the usual story.

Currently, to watch a quicktime animation on Linux, one first has to download the entire file. Then it can be viewed with xanim only if it happens to be compressed with a codec that's available for xanim. And even then, it never looks as smooth as an mtvp's mpg playback -- maybe xanim cuts frames both from mpgs and from quicktime or xanim's supported codecs are showing their age?

I wish companies would start making their codecs more freely available. How would it hurt Sorenson's market share if folk were able to expand, on their own, the number of platforms on which certain quicktime files could be viewed?

We monitor the Linux distributions used by the people who register the MpegTV Player ( mtv).

Currently we observe 20% to 30% more SuSE 6.1 users than RedHat 6.0 users. The observation is meaningful because the shareware version of mtv is bundled with those two Linux distributions.

By the way, RedHat now asks all ISV (Independent Software Vendors) to pay $2,495 if they want their products (commercial or shareware) bundled with RedHat's next release!

Needless to say, we will not pay RedHat this kind of money, when many other Linux distributors (like SuSE) will bundle our shareware without charging us a dime.

Thanks!

Haven't actually checked that we can play this, but I've put up a mirror of the above motion jpeg for when it goes down. :) I'd try mtv if xanim doesn't work.

http://rain.ashlu.bc.ca/~giles/starwars/

Now, anybody want to do a real mpg conversion?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

>>>Aw, did they reject you hitting them up for cash?

No. Actually we do not even charge for freeware players using Xaudio (e.g. C-4, MacAMP), and our licensing fees are fair and in relations with the business models of our customers.

>>> I can see why you
>>>might be happy at the lawsuit. Wonder if you're going to testify in
>>>favor of PlayMedia.

No, we will not. We have no business relations whatsoever with PlayMedia or Brian Litman.

>>> As for their image, I realize that some people
>>>(you, for instance) might consider that people writing their *own*
>>>code instead of *licensing* (the accepted corporate way) might be
>>>considered "bold" and dangerous.

No, on the contrary we consider that it is a choice that people have. Either write their own code, which takes time and does not come for free, or license an existing solution that works. It is a business decision to make when you make a product. The best choice depends on many factors (e.g. time to market, cost of licensing etc).

>>> Highly antisocial activity, if
>>>you ask me.

Then we are antisocial because we wrote Xaudio. We also wrote mtv, the only MPEG Video+audio and VCD player for Linux. Anything bad in doing that ?

>>>Nice to see you credit the original scientists. Still,
>>>slamming Nullsoft was a bit out of line. How many ground-breaking
>>>programs have *you* written? None? Nullsoft brought CD audio to
>>>the masses...inexpensively.

I give Nullsoft credit for that. But as I said, they could not have done that if it was not for the AMP player. WinAMP started as a simple graphic front-end for AMP, if I recall. Any kid good at windows programming can make a GUI. You do not need to be a genius or a great software architect. Justin had a good idea at the right time. But maybe he did not play by the rules of business, and should have gotten a licensing agreement from the AMP guy (Tomislav Uzelac) before making money using WinAMP.

>>> They could gouge (not much on Win32
>>>compares to WinAmp), and cripple their software, but they don't. I
>>>wouldn't say that Nullsoft is perfect, but compared to MediaPlay
>>>(and, yes, Xaudio), I'd give it high marks.

Maybe. But it looks like we are doing a pretty good business at licensing our Xaudio MP3 technology. Let the customers be juges. There is a healthy competition in this market.

--Tristan Savatier (Xaudio)

For example, mtv can play video streamed from a Sun Media Center server (raw UDP).

More streaming protocols can be handled by adding Stream Input Handler (SIH) plugins. This technology is available through the MpegTV SDK. Free development licenses are available. The SDK is available for Linux, Solaris and other Unix systems. It includes run-time MPEG video libraries and sample source code of applications.

-- MpegTV

For example, mtv can play video streamed from a Sun Media Center server (raw UDP).

More streaming protocols can be handled by adding Stream Input Handler (SIH) plugins. This technology is available through the MpegTV SDK. Free development licenses are available. The SDK is available for Linux, Solaris and other Unix systems. It includes run-time MPEG video libraries and sample source code of applications.

-- MpegTV

Posted by Jeremy Witt:

MpegTv can play it where xanim failed..

the link is www.mpegtv.com (I think)

Warning: They have some crazy closed license thing for it... (Linux Shareware? What the heck is that?)

JWitt

Use MpegTV for playing MPEG videos -- it comes with a program "mtvp" that doesn't cutoff after 30 seconds (like the graphical program it comes with, "mtv"). Throw in "-z" to double the screensize. It also has sound, and works a billion times better for MPEG videos than xanim.

To get MpegTV, head over to www.mpegtv.com.