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these patches were already sent to the MPlayer project.
but were rejected for various reasons.

here is the post which announced the coreavc-linux project:
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2007-July/052959.html

the coreavc codec is still faster than ffmpeg's ffh264 decoder. ffdshow has a multithreaded ffh264, but it was rejected by ffmpeg developers.

ffmpeg has a GSoC project for multithreaded decoding of most codecs.

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/ffmpeg/appinfo.html?csaid=9FD2BF705A5D5DBB

LONDON (AP) -- Google Apps today announced its first big hit: an AsciiArt video streaming proxy aimed at struggling British ISPs.

Coded by a Melvin Haymeggle, a young college student, in a little under 18 hours, the proxy uses the open-source video player MPlayer, and the video display library aalib, to convert streaming video on-the-fly into ASCII art.

"At first it was just a joke between me and a few friends," said Haymeggle. "Me and my roommates used it to mess with people leaching our wireless to watch porn. But then Google App Engine was announced, and we figured it would be fun to write up some Python bindings for it."

The announcement comes at a perilous time for British ISPs, who have been struggling to come to terms with the increased demand for on-demand video as a result of BBC's iPlayer.

"We were shocked -- shocked! -- to realize that new Internet applications result in increased use of resources like bandwidth," said Charles Freskell, a spokesman for the British ISPs Association. "We were on the verge of sending a bill to the BBC when this proxy came along."

"Of course, we're still going to be monetizing content ruthlessly," he added quickly.

The application quickly and seamlessly converts the iPlayer's 1024x960, 24-bit colour, 30 frame-per-second video stream into an 80x25, 8-bit greyscale, 4 frame-per-second video stream. It is estimated that the proxy will save over 9 petabytes per furlong-fortnight.

Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman could not be reached for comment. "He's just mad that everyone has forgotten this was available in Emacs since 1997," said a source close to the open source figurehead.

AMD Open Sources the AMD Performance Library ...and it looks strangely familiar. Funnily enough, the licence doesn't.

umm... that's exactly what I've been doing since the Fall update. They added MPEG4 (and some others) support. A little while later, uShare has been patched to serve these. Ever since I've been ripping my DVD collection with mencoder and have nearly filled up my shiny new Christmas present

You keep saying "store the codecs" which means you're not thinking about this problem in a sane fashion.

You don't compress

I checked this out earlier when CNN pointed it out. While imeem doesn't make it easy for you to download music, they are streaming standard Flash video with MP3 soundtracks, which makes it easily downloadable e.g. using DownloadHelper. The MP3 files can then be extracted using e.g. MPlayer ("mplayer -dumpaudio -dumpfile foo.mp3 foo.flv").

End result: free, often decent quality (128 kbps), legal MP3s of music from major labels (where fair use applies; the usual disclaimer about not being a lawyer also applies).

libavcodec, and thus ffmpeg, mplayer and cousins, have had a native decoder since 2004:
http://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk/libavcodec/flac.c?view=log

Besides, it's the svn version, but I don't see any configure option to use FLAC library...

Maybe heise could have more accurately pointed out which version are affected, because flac support from an external library must be an out-of-tree patch that I doubt most distros would apply.

Well, ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/) can play these media files.

Unfortunatelly, because ffmpeg developers did the right thing and said [1] that they don't care about software patents, ffmpeg is boycotted by all US linux distributions. Yeah, go use binary codecs.

[1] http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/legal.html

Well, ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/) can play these media files.

Unfortunatelly, because ffmpeg developers did the right thing and said [1] that they don't care about software patents, ffmpeg is boycotted by all US linux distributions. Yeah, go use binary codecs.

[1] http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/legal.html

Who didn't see this coming? Anyone trying to encode 640x480 h.264 videos for playback on the iPod/AppleTV certainly did, as they've left the format completely undocumented, require a stupid arbitrary UUID atom to be there or iTunes won't copy it to the player, and perhaps even worse, iTunes imposes other restrictions on the encoding options that hobble the quality, yet such files play fine on the iPod hardware, you are just forced to use a 3rd party app to copy such files over.
    http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2006-September/015930.html

IMHO, everyone should load up the RockBox firmware on their iPods, and tell Apple to screw themselves and their proprietary lockout nonsense, before they try to stop people from upgrading their firmware, too. As an added bonus, you are then able to use higher quality and open/patent-free audio formats (Ogg Vorbis/MPC Musepack).

MPlayer plays anything I throw at it, and is open source. I used to have VLC, but got disappointed in its buggy subtitle support. Best of all, Mplayer doesn't have a GUI, so the visual bloat is minimal.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

It uses a CLI (it's got a GUI too but who needs that pffft) and it keeps its codecs locally rather than using system ones. This might not be a plus in all cases, but it sure makes it portable and easy to set up (after a system reinstall I don't have to worry about reinstalling codecs).

there's mplayer with aalib, with libcaca, or even matrixview

there's mplayer with aalib, with libcaca, or even matrixview

There are lots of things (embedded Windows Media, etc) out there that I wouldn't expect to work on this setup

Using mplayer-plugin with Firefox and the full array of mplayer codecs works fine for me. On my Fedora box, just adding the Livna repositories enables yum to install everything in one shot with a "yum install mplayer*".

The ffmpeg group has so many of them, they've started using the bugtracker to keep track.

Use VLC or mplayer if you want to play DVDs on Windows without the need of those annoying codecs ;-).

Research for the Linux operating system benefits Windows too :)

Is it part of Mplayer?

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

Another article on what Vista doesn't do.... While I don't use any MS "operating system" products, if you feel you 'need to', perhaps MPlayer from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ is your answer. The Windoz pre-compiled port is incomplete but people I know, that use Windows, pick MPlayer. (In Europe, the media player is not normally bundled as its seen as an anti-trust issue.) If the 'DRM' is only in the media player, this should work and its "free". It might be a hack to get Vista to accept it though. Please send them a few bucks if you use a pre-compiled version, but they'd probably prefer someone to complete the port over money. The entire source tree and API is also available from the MP site and mirrors.

BillSF

PS: I use a EUR 30,-- ATI Radeon RV370 X550 which should be all the video card you need. $1000 is more than I pay for an entire dual-core amd64/3000MHz (2800MHz in 64bit mode) system with 4G of RAM and two 500G hard drives!

and don't forget MPlayer :)

Try out a LiveCD of Ubuntu or Kubuntu to see how well your hardware works (which should all work based on what you've said).

For image editting, on Kubuntu (or any KDE-based distribution really), try out Krita which is a lot more similar to Photoshop than Gimp ever will be. There is also cinepaint for an Aperture-like program.

For video editting, there's Kino and Cinelerra (I don't believe this is in the repository, so installing it isn't as easy as tick the box -> install). There is also Avidemux, but that seems to be more suited for small edits and transcoding videos (GNOME program as well, not that it matters if you don't care about desktop environments).

For office, check out KOffice (faster and better than OpenOffice.org).

For video, you can still use VLC of course, but you can also check out Kaffeine with libxine1-ffmpeg and the win32 codecs (download at http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html, get the essential codecs, extract to /usr/local/lib/codecs/; there is probably an easier way to do this via EasyUbuntu or something like that, but this is how I normally do it) for support for everything ever.

If you need more help, you can contact me via Jabber (in profile), or you can go on IRC (Konversation's a good client for that) on Freenode at #kubuntu. There are also the Ubuntu Forums as well as alt.os.linux.ubuntu (for some reason, I can't find the group on Google Groups, but it's available in AT&T's Usenet mirror). The community is very friendly and helpful, so don't be shy!

Wrong. We have open-source (GPL and LGPL) decoders for most formats and encoders for many formats inside ffmpeg (that used by MPlayer, vlc, xine and others).

Your information is obsolete by five years, if not more (when I started using MPlayer at ~2002, I already need not DLL crap for playing mpeg-{1,2,4} [and I need not other formats at that time; MPlayer/ffmpeg already supported [natively] many more even at that time, and support much more now, usually faster and/or better quality than commercial/closed/DLL crap]).


Yeah, but FFMpeg isn't the be all and end all. MPlayer also provides a buttload of other codecs - and that's where the copyright illegality comes in. Do a search for ".dll" on this page, and you can see the ones that are of highly questionable legality.

MPlayer HQ codecs status page

People did this in the past, but it really isn't necessary anymore. There are open source codecs for pretty much everything nowadays. The only thing that might not work is realvideo, but there's a LGPL decoder for that being developed.

mplayer rtsp://host/path/file.rm -dumpstream -dumpfile 'local.rm'

This is particularly useful to get rid of the "buffering" message. Just open an xterm and stream the file as above, then wait half a minute and open a second xterm and start playing the *local* file while it's still downloading at the same time:

mplayer local.rm

Flash also uses H.263+, and since encoding to that is supported in FFmpeg (and not On2 VP6), that's what sites like YouTube use.

Ogg Vorbis is gaining support in all sorts of places (e.g., tons of videogames, Wikipedia et al., some online music stores, etc.), and once Ogg Theora is fully standardised and better supported by other open source codecs (like FFmpeg), it can become more ubiquitous.

Oh, and if you were trying to praise On2's VP codecs, note that Theora is based on On2's VP3 (which they generously put all their patents into the public domain essentially). It's too bad that Xiph is a lot more focused on audio solutions rather than complete multimedia ones.

And for pure speculation, perhaps Adobe will add Theora and Vorbis to the list of acceptable codecs in a future version of Flash since they are patent- and royalty-free.

Here's an example - probably bad, because it's not based on Microsoft patents (as far as I know, anyway).

FFMpeg's legal page clearly states:

"Q: Does FFmpeg use proprietary/patented intellectual property?
A: Yes. There is a lot of multimedia available in proprietary/patented formats so it becomes necessary to support such formats and even reverse engineer them where required."

Who should be liable here - the developers of FFMpeg for including this patented code without paying the royalty fees, developers that incorporate FFMpeg into their products, people that use FFMpeg derivatives to do stuff with video (I assume Google is one of these as FFMpeg is/was one of their Summer of Code projects), or people that just use FFMpeg to play video? Or, of course, all of the above.

This is why mplayer is nice. Play any title immediately, without the stupid menu games or the mandatory FBI warning.

You might have more luck with MPlayer than you are currently having with the proprietary player.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

Linux users do not have to pay for software

There, I fixed your purposeful omission it for you.

take responsibility for your own needs and write the software you want.

Isn't free software up to the challenge?

Where have you been for the past twenty years?

Let's assume this is a "because it's there" hack, because as others have pointed out, if all you want is a large video screen, you'd be better off spending the time doing a McJob and spending the proceeds on a projector.

So, you're doing it because it would be kinda cool. Have a play with GGI. It's a portable graphics layer with various targets implemented. e.g. there are kernel targets for various graphics cards, a Windows target, a VNC target, etc.

What'll interest you is the display-tile target, which is a proxy target that splits its input into tiles and forwards them to a set of other targets.

So:
  - find the most efficient way you can to display video on a GGI target. Mplayer can do it. here is a screenshot of mplayer tiled across a load of X windows via display-tile.
  - Set up each of your displays to be a GGI target that your central box can display to (be it VNC, X, or something more original)
  - configure display-tile to forward the right tiles to the right targets
  - point mplayer at display-tile
  - profit!

The tiles don't have to be a regular size. I'd quite like to see a video wall made up of various sized screens - a 32" TV here, a 17" monitor there, a PSP there, etc... maybe a vt100 in there displaying the aalib target...

Fun!

SUre my computer is 5 years old. But could they not at least admit they don't play on 800Mhz computers?

I bought a TV card specifically to do this but never used it because this has worked so well:

I play the tape on a good VCR. The video and stereo audio output are hooked up to a Sony Digital Handycam (it's a DCR-TRV350). And the camcorder Firewire cable is connected to the PC.

This lets the Camcorder do all the heavy lifting. It outputs standard digital video which I capture with kino. I also use kino to do the clean-up, capture a frame (as a jpeg) and export some sound to use as the title screen for what will be the final DVD. The sound gets exported as a .wav which I convert to mp2 with ffmpeg.

Still with kino, I break up the video into chunks (about 4-6 minutes each) for chapters so I can skip through the DVD when it done. I then export the video in DVD format, telling kino to split chapters into seperate files (this makes chapter creation automatic in the next step).

I then use 'Q' DVD-Author to build the DVD filesystem. Although 'Q' DVD-Author can create the DVD automatically (calling dvdauthor), I prefer to tweak the dvdauthor.xml file to do some fun menu things and run dvdauthor manually.

I check my DVD (while still a directory on my hard disc) with totem, or mplayer. Finally I write it out using growisofs from the dvd+rw-tools project.

All this is running on a Debian system that is several years old. Nothing fancy or top-of-the-line here.

That's pretty much it. Been working great for me.

As for that TV card? Well, I watch TV with it - it's hooked up to my cable.

I bought a TV card specifically to do this but never used it because this has worked so well:

I play the tape on a good VCR. The video and stereo audio output are hooked up to a Sony Digital Handycam (it's a DCR-TRV350). And the camcorder Firewire cable is connected to the PC.

This lets the Camcorder do all the heavy lifting. It outputs standard digital video which I capture with kino. I also use kino to do the clean-up, capture a frame (as a jpeg) and export some sound to use as the title screen for what will be the final DVD. The sound gets exported as a .wav which I convert to mp2 with ffmpeg.

Still with kino, I break up the video into chunks (about 4-6 minutes each) for chapters so I can skip through the DVD when it done. I then export the video in DVD format, telling kino to split chapters into seperate files (this makes chapter creation automatic in the next step).

I then use 'Q' DVD-Author to build the DVD filesystem. Although 'Q' DVD-Author can create the DVD automatically (calling dvdauthor), I prefer to tweak the dvdauthor.xml file to do some fun menu things and run dvdauthor manually.

I check my DVD (while still a directory on my hard disc) with totem, or mplayer. Finally I write it out using growisofs from the dvd+rw-tools project.

All this is running on a Debian system that is several years old. Nothing fancy or top-of-the-line here.

That's pretty much it. Been working great for me.

As for that TV card? Well, I watch TV with it - it's hooked up to my cable.

Doesn't anyone use Google anymore? Do a quick search on AAC and do a little reading; you'll find that the same wonderful people who created MP3 also had a huge hand in creating AAC. Like MP3, it's a technology available to anyone who wants to pay a licensing fee. And like MP3, you should be able to create a LAME-like codec that doesn't infringe upon anyone's copyright. Suspecting you won't take the time to look this up either, I decided to do the research for you.on this point too. Guess what? FFMPEG has an AAC decoder and the code is non-infringing! Moreover, the iPod isn't the only portable player supporting AAC -- there are lots of them. Heck, even the Zune supports AAC! Do you think that would happen if Apple owned all of the rights to file format?

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2 007-March/026102.html

It seems that these fellows (http://www.mp4converter.net/dvd-to-appletv-conver ter-mac.html), took ffmpef, renamed it to avc, put it in a nice box and are making money on the work of others without even giving credit where it's due.

AV software?

Why should someone use something else than MPlayer http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ for Audio/Video playback?

So it seems like it ought to be possible to 'recontainerize' a Divx .divx or .avi into an .mp4 file without decompressing and recompressing it, thus avoiding loss.

Get mencoder for demuxing from avi, MP4Box for muxing into mp4 and optionally AtomicParsley for metadata. Windows binaries: [1] [2] [3]

On Linux install the packages MPlayer and gpac.

Sample code

mencoder -ovc copy -nosound -of rawvideo -o "temp.264" "the.avi"
mencoder -ovc frameno -oac copy -of rawaudio -o "temp.aac" "the.avi"
MP4Box -fps $fps -add "temp.264"#video -add "temp.aac"#audio -new "the.mp4"
atomicparsley "the.mp4" --stik "Music Video" -W

You can find out the framerate (frames per second) of the avi with ffmpeg [4].

ffmpeg -i "the.avi" nul 2>&1

Look for the line with fps in it.

RTFM of the parsley to see what sort of metadata you can add.

Now mod me up, bitches.

mp4 is not a proprietary Apple format, but an ISO standard that anyone can support. VLC Media player supports it. Also, ffmpeg has h264. When it comes to which has better hardware support, mp4 wins. When it comes to software support, mp4 wins. MPEG4 is an open standard. There are patents involved, but no royalties. Matroska was created to avoid patents, whereas mp4 has many patents in it. Matroska surely violates someones patents, but we just don't know whose yet. MPEG 4 has all the patent issues sorted out.

I actually just finished transcoding all of my video to mp4 as i prefer its subtitle support over the cheesy avi hacks. DivX was created during the non standard days of MPEG4, as the spec was not finalized. That spec is now finalised, and the standard codec is h264 in an mp4 container. These videos play in Windows, Linux or any other OS which has an h264 codec. They can be imported into iTunes as best as i know. My iTunes question of the day is actually which subtitle formats they use, as I don't know the answer to that.

Also,

if books are ever going to return to mainstream, they need to replace all those words with pictures.

...And your arrogant, flip little comment, reflecting the general attitude of the Computer Priesthood(tm), is EXACTLY why Linux will NEVER be ready for the desktop.

The (in your terms) Luser must never, ever, ever HAVE to experience a config file, nor HAVE to type in some INCANTATION into a CLI. Period.

I suppose you'd find it acceptable to have to write an XML file to record a program on your DVR, too?

Oh wait! I forgot! The MUST HAVE Linux DVD PLAYER, MPlayer, *still* runs from the Command Line by default, doesn't it?

Heck, the MPlayer GUI isn't even in the BUILD by default!

From the MPlayer Docs: "MPlayer comes with a GUI that is not build by default. The GUI section of the documentation explains how to enable it. Several external MPlayer frontends provide alternative GUIs."

I rest my case.

If you are happy to host the video yourself, create the FLV with FFmpeg, there's a tutorial on it here: FLV encoding with ffmpeg.

..and use Jeroen Wijering's Flash Video Player for playback.

I don't know about you, but it plays fine on my Kubuntu Edgy with Firefox. Have you tried Mplayer with mplayer-plugin? Don't forget the w32 codecs from mplayer's site.

I went to France24 and clicked Live Feed and it played fine.

Here are a few choices:

http://www.mythtv.org/
http://xinehq.de/
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

You could also by a DVD player from any of a large number of SouthEast Asia based companies that don't implement region locking, MacroVision, and customer skip lockout flags. I bought an Apex 600-A years ago for just that reason.

you mean like mplayer? vlc?

I haven't scrolled to the bottom yet to see if this is redundant, but FFMPEG has recently added WMV9 and VC1 decoders. http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ It works fine for all of the Legacy content that I have. They also have MPEG/2/4 and a whole bunch of others. The only codec that I seem to be missing is Indeo 5

BBH

I think someone should point them to the ffmpeg changelog. Actually it does open lots of proprietary formats and VLC uses the same codebase for his own engine.

I suppose the market is Linux distributors who can't bundle MPlayer for legal reasons. Can't see anyone buying this directly, though.

They'd probably be legally unable to be as good as MPlayer, (a universal video player, home page, debs), as licensing some codecs will require signing up to agreements to play nicely with DRM. MPlayer is good because there's none of that nonsense: it just works, for every video that I've tried.

Since Oct/06 MPlayer can decode WMV9.