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Check the Mplayer website, the Mplayer project no longer has a leader. Its not certain if the project will survive.

this is really irrelevant! mplayer & co. (xine etc.) have been able to handle stuff like this for months now..

no reason to mod ppl whoring up for nothing!

Mplayer can play these on Linux; I was just watching them this morning.

Mplayer. It plays nearly everything.

Unfortunately, it appears that Ogg Theora development is "mostly dead". The main developer has been stuck doing contract work (on the integer decoder for Vorbis, as far as I can tell) and can't get to it "for the foreseeable future". The mailing lists are almost completely dead, and, most tellingly, Xiph hasn't updated the theora.org page since January.

I doubt very much they'll have the 1.0 release next month as they have been saying since last June that they'd do...Alpha 1 was looking really promising, but Alpha 2 got pushed back twice (originally scheduled for early December 2002...then late December...then they stopped talking about it anywhere.) Last I'd heard was they were planning to skip Alpha 2 and go straight to Beta in March. Obviously that didn't happen. I do know Monty managed to get some (non-Theora-specific?) work done that will benefit Ogg Theora, but that was back in February, and nobody's talking about it since then.

There are hints that there are other people puttering with the code a little (and VP3 decoding support [the "video codec" part of Ogg Theora - I gather there are still a few "tweaks" to be worked out to turn VP3 into "Ogg Theora"] is slowly being worked on for ffmpeg, Xine, and MPlayer.) but I don't know if Xiph has enough attention on it to get anything out. (Support for VP3/Theora video codec going into Xine is mentioned - very briefly - in the latest "Ogg Traffic" newsletter which at least indicates SOMEBODY remembers that Theora exists. I think if they at least got out some documentation on the format (particularly the .ogg part - they say .ogm is 'horribly hacked' but until there's a "proper" standard available for people to work to, that's all we have for "video-in-ogg") it would help. (If encoding support for Theora in ffmpeg/mplayer isn't far behind, then adoption and work on it outside of Xiph will probably pick up pretty quickly.)

Kinda sad to see the project languish silently as it has for most of the year - some days I can't tell if Xiph will be abandoning Ogg Theora or ever getting back to it or what...

As a side note, back on the topic of "codec comparison", my playing with the one and only release of Ogg Theora way back when it was released (8 months ago!) gave me the impression that it can be a very nice format, especially for more compressed bitrate. Where most codecs seem to get "blockier" as they compress, VP3/Theora seems to get "blurrier" instead, which to my eye generally "looks nicer", despite the fact that it has lost as much actual information from the video as the "blockier" codecs (e.g. mpeg4). IF Xiph ever gets around to some file format documentation and VP3/Theora encoding support appears relatively soon, I can easily imagine Ogg Theora becoming a popular format for internet video and archiving home video.

My music server is a Linux box, though; I cannot use it to play DRM-encumbered music, because Apple has not chosen to make Linux software available for their protection scheme.

AAC isn't a DRM system -- it's just a fairly modern music encoding. Mplayer groks it. Use FAAC with it as per the mplayer codecs docs.

Frankly, I wish people would stop getting upset about folks not using mp3 (aside from those who spent a ton of money on those little low fidelity hardware players -- and even those folks knew that MP3 would be obsolete at some point). MP3 isn't bad, but neither is it up to snuff with AAC and ogg.

As for those who want losslessly compressed music...hell, we can't even convince people to give up lossy JPEG in favor of PNG and lossless JPEG. Music files are much larger -- it'll be years after lossy JPEG goes away that we move away from lossy sound compression.

Oops, correction: mplayer does play it with the right codecs from its site.

... or mplayer

You need some non-free crap to view the trailer because of the monopoly! Oh the joys of proprietary software!

Or you could just install mplayer.

SealBeater

I happily stand corrected. I was too lazy to scroll down the page on the news releases. Thats my fault. However, mplayer gents need to update their Other Media Projects links page, where it still states broadq.com is in violation. http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design6/projects. html

"If you register the player online, which involves answering some very personal questions and effectively allowing Microsoft a good look at your PC, then you get the full version. Otherwise you're left with a cut down version.

"If they applied this tactic to Linux users, imagine the information they could get their hands on."

Indeed.

Even if they ported it, would you use it with those stipulations?

One word. MPlayer.

Actually you can get sound for it. You need to download libfaad and then recompile MPlayer with --with-faad (or --with-libfaad I can't remember which) to get it to work. 0.90 works nicely

I am not sure I understand your question. You could just use mplayer if you are trying to see it on Linux/x86. You can use Apple's Quicktime for Windows or on a Mac. Also, re-encoding a movie results in quality loss. I'll second that QT is evil because Apple won't release a native Linux version. Is a licensing issue with Sorensen codec or something?

To decode some Mpeg4 stuff, it uses native Windows DLLs, which to legally use, you must have Windows.
i don't actually think so, afaik all mpeg-4 video is decoded with lavc from ffmpeg project, which is is LGPL if i read correctly from their homepage. for mpeg-4 audio, there is an opensource decoder too, faad2. another good link could be mplayer's (excellent) documents starting from here or in DOCS/ in source dir.

-rzei

According to the FAQ you can compile it on Windows using Cygwin. On the subject of ports, Mac OS X users may be interested in MPlayer OS X.

Mplayer already does this...whats the big deal? ;)

But no-one seems to distribute it because of pretty licesing (I'm sure someone must distribute it somewhere) :-(

?

MPlayer is GPL.

Prepare yourself for five hundred posts linking to MPlayer in this thread.

And right now I use the windows DLL's through mplayer on my main computer all the time. So what I want is wmv and wma native to my computer, even if it isn't open source. I can live with it. The dlls I'm using now aren't.

What about libavcodec/ffmpeg? It has an open source and native WMV codec!

There's just some question about using the (free as in beer) DLLs from WMP with it...Of course, if you're arguing from a Free as in speech stance, then nothing here is good. It's closed on Windows to closed on Linux. Zero advancement.

Actually, there is an
open source versionof WMV, minus the DRM portion of it. No DLL's required to view them in linux.

MPlayer has it's own open source version of WMV7/8 (WMV1/2?) from ffmpeg/libavcodec. No Windows DLLs required (except for WMV9 but that's because of DRM?)

BTW, MPlayer v0.90 stable version was just released.

It's simple. If this is not released under an open source licence then it is pointless. MPlayer can already play windows media files, although not licenced by Microsoft.

The point is that Mplayer although supporting multiple architectures only plays windows media files well if at all on Intel machines. For those of us running PC's this is fine, but those running PPC or SPARC machines will have a few more troubles with the win32 dll's.

Unless Intervideo plans on supporting all of these architectures or simply not even allowing this to be used in the desktop arena, and only in the handheld/embedded, then they need to make it some form of open source.

Hey even shared source (don't kill me) would be better than nothing for alternate architectures, as long as it supports them.

If by "one day" you mean "now", and if by "WM formats" you mean "just about every media format there is (including MPEG4, wma, wmv, mov)", then you'd be right. It's called mplayer, it's available now, it's open source, and it works.

You can find it here

For you Linux nuts who are worrying about it not being open-source and therefore not being able to use it in your own distro, just use MPlayer .I use it, and it plays Windows Media files very well. There are plenty of other progs for *nix that can play Windows Media, so this isn't really that special.

I thought this was already possible?

That 'Windows' is a typo I think.

(Beware, AtomFilms only use the Windows Media Player format now.)

No Problemo...

I don't know any good guide on how to do this, but using MPlayer under Linux you "just" issue the following command:

mencoder -tv on:driver=v4l:input=1:width=640:height=480:adevice =/dev/dsp:amode=0 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=128 -o myvideo.avi

with the correct video capture device loaded (e.g. bttv), video cable plugged to the video input, sound cable to the soundcard, and you obtain a 640x480 DivX with MP3 stereo audio, on the fly, using a 600MHz+ machine :-)

apparently the DivX version was encoded using a weird codec that doesn't work on all players

Video shows fine for me, using ffdshow alpha 2003-01-03, get it here. Also works fine with latest mplayer.

Mplayer is your friend!

I'll download and convert this to XVID AVI, easily playable on Windows with Media Player and Linux with MPlayer. It should be done by tonight, and I'll post it to alt.binaries.multimedia.anime.

Oh, and you may need to patch MPlayer to play this, the patch is here.

Unless the patch has made it into the current release/CVS.

mplayer is your friend.

Auctally, you can play sorenson V1 and V3 (Both of which are used for most trailers and such) with Mplayer
Which will also play WMV/A, Divx,real and a bunch of other audio/video formats

Hello,
There is Freevo http://freevo.sf.net that has a better UI! Also, you can run it under X or Framebuffer or anything else SDL supports (like DXR3!)
As it uses the great MPlayer as the underlying player, it supports Mov, DivX, Mp3, Ogg, ... Almos every {video,music} format in the world. It also have a image browser and a cute TV Guide (now a Web version too!) and it plays Mame!
The time shifting is in the work.
Freevo: http://freevo.sf.net Mplayer: http://www.mplayerhq.hu

This is ages ago. It's long been resolved. See the news on the MPlayer homepage (scroll down a bit to 2002.10.29).

See here for a post in the dicussion. I haven't kept up with more (such as if they have fullfilled the terms of the gpl by releaseing source).

go to mplayerhq.hu

From v0.90pre2 changes: "experimental Sorenson 1/3 encoding (using quicktime DLLs) (only to AVI, and these files can only be played with MPlayer! It's needless to mail us about when will be MOV encoding too, as neither we know:) "

Mencoder is part of MPlayer."

It is not complete, but chances are you can encode/capture avi-ish Sorenson with Mencoder. This will probably work with most of the extra filters and encoding options to make changes the video. Seeing .mov support in other programs, I doubt finishing .mov support in Mencoder will take long.

Although I bet linux still not that great for MOV editing/encoding, it's coming along quite nicely right now as you can see.

1. First, apply this patch found here. To do so, just download MPlayer's source into the libmpdemux directory and run "patch < /path/to/patchfile" before compiling (make sure you compile it in such a way as to allow for Quicktime playing - make sure it'll do other Sorenson Quicktime files first).
2. Next, once MPlayer is compiled and installed, run it as "mplayer -delay -10 animatrix_blah.mov" The "delay" setting in there because otherwise the sound runs ten seconds before the video, which isn't very good.

Well, I should take part of that back; for the first twenty seconds or so, the video ran at about 1fps or less, and Mplayer spewed a bunch of "Your computer is too SLOW!" warnings, but that was evidentally just due to some inadequecies in the Quicktime format with relation to seeking. Once everything was synced up (well before the action starts) it went fine.

Found this patch on the MPlayer-Users mailing list.

Now, if someone could just tell me how to apply it... :)

Mplayer supports aalib output and can play many more formats including quicktime.

Mplayer supports aalib output and can play many more formats including quicktime.

If Apple's hardware was competitive, they could compete without having to force hardware upgrades to run Jaguar

• Jaguar runs fine without it (and is still faster than Mac OS X 10.1.5 graphics-wise)
• the reason it's not supported on lower-end graphics cards is because they don't have the hardware necessary to support its implementation (they have to support textures with a size tht's not a power of 2)

Not making Quicktime for Linux is communist

I've read a couple of times in the past on the mac-games-dev list hosted at Apple, that developers considering to port their (small-scale) game from Mac to Windows were encouraged by other developers to simply require QTfW, since then they wouldn't have to change their code that much (nor really learn the win32 API in-depth).

So you see, porting Quicktime to Linux would mean porting that age-old toolbox stuff over to Linux. And no, they haven't already don't a *nix port for Mac OS X, since there they use Carbon (which is based on the old toolbox API). Given that the ROI would be quite small (who's gonna upgrade to Quicktime Pro for $29,95? What Linux pro-video app creators for Linux will go into a Quicktime-pro bundling deal with Apple?), I think they don't do it simply because it doesn't make any business sense.

File format lock-in (like Quicktime) is communist, because it's a barrier to competition.

Taking from BSD and giving nothing (or nearly nothing) back is communist

I mean, what should they do according to you? Give all BSD distro's a penny per line of source code that they used? Do you think that's what those distro's want? I doubt it. In general, what an open source project wants is that its stuff gets used, improved/bug fixed if necessary and that they get recognition for it. I don't see where Apple failed.

Apart from that, there's of course the obligatory mention of Apple's work on gcc (which is used by pretty much every open source OS out there, including the BSD's), resulting in (on average) 30% faster code generation for the PowerPC in version 3.x, altivec intrinsics and obj-c++ support. Yes, they were required to make their changes to gcc public since it's GPL, but

• they were never forced to use gcc (they could've also take MrC, which still generates much better code than gcc)
• they were also never forced to actively submit patches to the FSF, rework them when they're rejected and submit them again etc

It's of course obvious that Apple doesn't do all those things simply because it loves open source and wants to support us hackers. It does those things because it makes sense for them (in case of choosing gcc instead of MrC, that's because MrC's C++ support was quite mediocre; with the submitting of patches it's because otherwise they have to remerge all their patches with every new release, while now the FSF maintainers make sure that the accepted patches are maintained).

All the ranting about Apple being communist, capitalist and/or corporatist aside, I think it's clear that Apple currently tries to do as much things as possible in such a way that it's both good for itself and the open source community. Yes, when there are big trade-offs, it's the open source camp that "loses" (but that's logical, Apple is still a company and if it doesn't make such decisions, there will simply be no Apple anymore in a couple of years).

Well, that's enough ranting in an old thread for today <g>

Download and install mplayer. Compile it yourself: do not use a binary. Enable the win32 codecs (untar w32codec.tar.bz2 to /usr/lib before the ./configure step). All other installation options can be left as defaults (do not enable the gui, it's not worth your time). Then perform the following two commands:

mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile rip.vob -dvd 1 /dev/dvd
mencoder -o rip-encoded.avi -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=192:vbr=2 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:keyint=250 -vop pp rip.vob
# play with the encoding options if you want
# a different balance of quality/file size

Files don't rot. Enjoy your DVDs for a lifetime.

I'd say this goes beyond mere "complaining." :)

Fair enough, although under Linux the 'tax' is payable if you want to run Win32 browser plugins or apps using Crossover Plugin/Office; as I posted before Palm synchronisation is free (though less integrated).

Heck, the latest version of MPlayer can even play back Quicktime and Windows Media Player videos on x86, using native Windows DLLs, and there is even a plug-in for Mozilla.

By the way, MPlayer is available with an OSX front-end too - I have not tried out the various video encoding solutions under OS X but certainly worth looking over (once my PB arrives).

This might get modded off topic so turning off my karma bonus :P Slashcode should allow private messaging...

mplayer. In case you have any other questions regarding recording or viewing video using open source software, from or to any format, the answer to those questions is also mplayer.

mplayer. In case you have any other questions regarding recording or viewing video using open source software, from or to any format, the answer to those questions is also mplayer.