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xbmc ... plays stuff I can't play on my windows machine.

You didn't misread the page, but the page is out of date. As of a few months ago, there is an open source implementation of WMV3 aka VC1 in libavcodec. WMA2 has been implemented for a while. That video plays just fine on my 64bit linux without Microsoft's binary codecs.

I have to assume this, since I can't view this content on my own Linux desktop (CNN anyone?)

What's the specs of your machine? I've never had a problem with Matroska files, with the exception of on my laptop. The mkv package format is more complex than (for example) avi and takes more procesing power/ram - which might be why you find it skips at action scenes (there is more data being processed at these times).

For reference, btw - my desktop is an Athlon XP 2500+ Mobile (clocked @ 233*12) with 1GB RAM, my laptop is a p3 650 with 128 MB RAM, running W2k.

On the laptop I tried various players/codec packs and found that MPlayer, running the command line version (not the gui version) works a treat with mkv's. Simply add

"%wherever_you_installed_mplayer%\mplayer -slang eng" "%t"

to the file handler command and you'll have "point and click" opening of mkv files. I did this via the registry, but it can be done from Folder Options --> File Types.

No. It would be illegal (in some countries) to use Windows files - they got its own license and it wold be sloppy. Instead VLC uses ffmpeg codecs which implement (partially) WMV9 decoding (but no DRM and no encoding *FIXME*). Ffmpeg codecs are another implementation (than Windows DLLs) achieved through reverse-engeenering (which also may be illegal to use in some countries).

As for now from ffmpeg documentation:
http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC23

WMV8 and WMV9 are "not completely working". But I think they may work well for 90% of media files out there.

So kudos for VLC team for another great release. :)

You can use Mplayer from http://mplayerhq.hu/ - download the windows binary and the codec pack, and then extract the codec pack into the codecs directory, and associate the mplayer binary with Quicktime files. This will play virtually all video formats. MPlayer might be illegal in countries with software patents or other silly laws, but it is a great demonstration of what is possible through free software.

1. Please read the MPlayer documentation, or, at the very least build it for yourself at least once. It doesn't use winelib. Feel free to correct me if you can find it anywhere on
2. The dangerous part is the codec. No self-respecting linux user would run a random windows program as root, but they may not think twice about the codec (figuring that it's properly sandboxed by mplayer - which it is).

3. It may, but try, just once, to have an exe link to an elf library. Even if it found out, the codec couldn't even know how to link into libc6, at least not by any method I can think of.

4. True. But it's also not the only way to capture the keyboard. I was giving an example of a way to spy.

The lossless codec has been reverse engineered. WMP uses ActiveX components to decode audio, so it's not that hard to add support for any audio format if you know how to write .ax dll. Other media players have their own codec formats, and in fact FFMPEG has support for ALAC, so you don't need to.

Thanks for the suggestion, but this didn't work for me. I downloaded a video from YouTube using the VideoDownloader 2.0 extension for FireFox and can watch the FLV file just fine in FLV Player 1.3.3. I downloaded MPlayer 1.0pre8 Windows build from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html and ran the command "mplayer -vo null -dumpaudio FLVfilename". It created a stream.dump file, which I then renamed to .MP3. Playing it in Windows Meadia Player indicated that it was a 43 second MP3 (even though the video is close to two minutes) and it was, sadly, 43 seconds of silence.

Any suggestions? Did I mess up somewhere? Thanks!

Do you know of any programs that will convert a YouTube video straight to MP3?

I was originally going to post a Windows-only method that involved GraphEdit and some non-standard DirectShow filters, but then a brainfart revealed this cross-platform solution:

mplayer -vo null -dumpaudio foo.flv && mv stream.dump foo.mp3

The audio in an .flv file is already MP3 (in every file I've run across, anyway). All you need to do is demux the file and save the audio; MPlayer can do that, and it's available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (maybe others, too).

It's very easy to write a frontend to MPlayer.
It's based on standard text input/output, so even a shell script can do it.
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/tech/slave.txt

Actually, you can address a lot of those types of problems (like playlist management, etc.) with one of the many mplayer frontends on their related projects page. All you need to do is choose whichever one you prefer and mplayer is your best friend for video playback.

Disclaimer: I've never worked with video-out hardware in any sort of broadcasting environment.

In playing around with various video sources, I've come across a couple of very good, high quality pieces of software that are able to transcode video from almost any source. If you do not need client-side playback and just want to pipe re-coded a/v streams to a tv-out device, consider using transcode:

http://www.transcoding.org/cgi-bin/transcode

I've never heard of SDI, but transcode's documentation states that it supports yuv4mpeg output. Transcode is really an excellent piece of software and should fill your need quite nicely.

You might also consider mplayer, as it explicitly supports yuv4mpeg output as well. You can use mencoder (a part of mplayer) to transcode video in the same way that you would use transcode.

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

As for the automatic scheduling of content to be played.. cron would do the job if your needs are simple. If, however, you need to insert content in the middle of a video during playback (read: a commercial) it will probably be insufficient. I'd suggest preprocessing the video for the next day each night. You'd need a list of timestamps where it is reasonable to stop playback of video content and then split out each video, writing yuv output to a (large) storage device.

You'd then be left with a day's worth of preprocessed video in yuv format that can be fed directly to your digital broadcast hardware in real-time. I'd imagine then that you could just feed the video directly into your output device using something like 'cat `cat video-sources.list` > /dev/video-out'.

MPlayer & MEncoder http://www.mplayerhq.hu/

ffmpeg

x264 (library)

I use mplayer, mencoder, and ffmpeg with the x264 library to encode dvd's to the h.264 standard mp4. I use mplayer to playback dvd's and videos. You can get frontends for mplayer, but I like it because you can easily integrate it into bash scripts. If I have some time when I get home, I can post some of the scripts that I use, and perhaps try to explain some of the settings I'm using.

For scheduled playback, you can do a playlist with mplayer and use a script and a cron job for it. Another nice thing about mplayer is that you can tell it when to start and stop playback of a file, if for example you wanted to interrupt a program 5 minutes in for a commercial break you could tell it to start at 0 and elapse 5 minutes. Then you could tell it, after the commercials, to start at 5 minutes and elapse another 10 minutes. (I'd post the code now, but the firewall here is blocking the mplayer site).

For video, I have better luck(on Windows XP) with the various FFMpeg based players(VLC, mplayer) than I do with directshow(Windows Media Player, winamp, etc). They don't do drm, but the codec support and fault tolerance is way better. They at least try to play broken video files, which is a big improvement over WMP. FFDShow installs FFMpeg as a directshow filter, giving you access to the codecs in the gui of your choice.

Links:

http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
http://ffdshow.sourceforge.net/tikiwiki/tiki-view_ articles.php

For video, I have better luck(on Windows XP) with the various FFMpeg based players(VLC, mplayer) than I do with directshow(Windows Media Player, winamp, etc). They don't do drm, but the codec support and fault tolerance is way better. They at least try to play broken video files, which is a big improvement over WMP. FFDShow installs FFMpeg as a directshow filter, giving you access to the codecs in the gui of your choice.

Links:

http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
http://ffdshow.sourceforge.net/tikiwiki/tiki-view_ articles.php

But seriously, Joe Barr: 1. Did not RTFM 2. Was impatient and gave up his first attempt while it was still running.

Joe Barr again? Cmon... If I remember (2001) mplayer was one of his "victims" http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/joe-barr.html
You cant take any of his reviews or articles seriously.
Go ahead, mod the hell down out of this post... - Im posting as anonymous coward because I dont have an account and I couldnt care less.

I don't believe Apple Lossless codecs are available for Linux

Maybe you should take a look at this.

...play most video formats with a single simple player that treats files of the same extension all alike (.mkv and .avi will not play the same in all players), and the ability to play DVDs, etc,...

Mplayer? VLC?

I tend to do basically what MPlayer does nowadays, and that includes using Subversion for SCM, Bugzilla for bugs, Mailman for mailing lists, and Apache HTTPD for serving it all. I like to maintain a Debian Sid package (you can't directly upload to stable or testing anyhow, so the Debian maintainers will take care of adapting the package for those distros), and if someone else on the team knows anything about RPM, we also maintain the .spec file as well. I also like to keep an emerge script in there as well, but even if I didn't, someone would write one faster than you can bootstrap a Gentoo Mac Pro, so there's nothing to worry about there.

Is any of this fancy pants video processing capability usuable under linux? It had better be, after all the PR about how nvidia's drivers share around 98% of their code between the windows and linux versions.

Sure. Just compile and install mplayer (http://mplayerhq.hu/) and shoot :

mplayer -sws 9 -fs -zoom -vf pp=unsharp=l:c:7x7:5/denoise3d=12:12:12 -ac hwac3 dvd://

There's a Firefox plugin for just that purpose. It also supports Google Video and a ton of other sites. The videos in YouTube are actually "flash video" (.flv), not Flash per se. You can play them with e.g. "mplayer" (not the same as Windows Media Player).
Firefox plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/
MPlayer: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/

From http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/changelog.html for the 'next' version:

"- VC-1/WMV3/WMV9 video decoder"

http://mplayerhq.hu/ This plays everything already. Why would I want another bulky player from Real...?

in version "":

http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/changelog.html

To start a you tube you will need:
FFMPEG http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/: for video conversion
FlowPlayer http://flowplayer.sourceforge.net/howto.html: displaying flash video
or Flash Video Player http://jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash_Video_Player
FFMPEG-PHP http://ffmpeg-php.sourceforge.net/: If php is used a nice extension for getting screen shots of videos, not necessary though
flvtool2 http://rubyforge.org/projects/flvtool2/: so you can seek though the created flash file
Then all you need is leverage framework or cms in php, or phython, or something and you are done. (well sort of!)

Ah, yeah, I guess it's been too long. In that case, QuEnc (a free encoder based on libavcodec from the FFMPEG project) may be the best choice.

Audio Bitrate: 1536 Kbps Audio Sample Size: 16 bit Audio Format: PCM

I think it should be possible to convert the stream to a file, perhaps using Mplayer or similar but I can't find the appropriate executable to call from the command-line in the Mplayer.app binary I just downloaded. If anyone has any joy with this I'd love to see a torrent of a single movie file of the presentation, so I can actually enjoy watching it.

I'm sure it used to be possible to watch Steve's keynotes live on the web. Or maybe it's just that when I used to work full-time I was able to avoid commentary on them until after I'd watched them. In any case, reading about a keynote just spoils it for me - there's something about the show I enjoy.

Stroller.

Totem plays the stream perfectly.

You can download codecs from:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

Not quite! Google Video (along with Youtube and some others) uses Flash Video, which is a different beastie from Shockwave Flash. You can get hotlinks for downloading from VideoDownloader.net. Once downloaded, you can view them with MPlayer. Happy viewing.

Personally I've never understood why people with this kind of connections bother to download movies. I've been playing movies streaming over a network with mplayer since I've had a 400 KB capable connection (no dvd quality though). Mplayer is great for this, you can feed it http addresses directly or, since that's often not possible, start playing a movie that's being downloaded at the same time. It's just that some codecs do not allow seeking when streaming. Like you say, speed is more and more a question of the sender rather than the sender. I sincerely hope there will be fast synchronous connections over here in the near future too. Currently I've got a 20/4 Mbps connection, which barely allows me to run a remote desktop service, but nothing more. I would've preferred 10/10 Mbps. Well, enjoy your connection as long as you can :D

Anyway, gmencoder, konverter, iriverter, movieconvert, and a load of other stuff.

And since you mentioned SVCD specifically, here is Tovid (screenshot)

a collection of video disc authoring tools; it can help you create your own DVDs, VCDs, and SVCDs for playback on your home DVD player.

Don't know if any of that stuff is right though... Good luck!

ffmpeg and mplayer cvs is down (and mailing lists, both are hosted on mphq1)... operations are in motion to switch cvs to svn (on mphq2 box). the admin of mphq1 is not in the area of said box and is not contactable atm.

current mplayer and ffmpeg snapshots are availible at
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/~rtogni/snapshots

this information and more can be found in the #mplayer support irc channel on irc.freenode.net

• 1024x576
• 425MB (Bittorrent)
• 425MB (USA #1)
• 425MB (USA #2)
• 425MB (Australia)
• 425MB (Germany)
• 425MB (Netherlands)

Only playable in: VLC Media Player MPlayer

Videolan was already recommended; I'd add in a vote for mplayer -- they're both built off the same codec core, but with very different interfaces (VLC is like a typical windows app, MPlayer a linux one (ie. way more power, if you spend a week or so RTFMing and getting used to it))

Is zero skin enough for you?
Try http://mplayerhq.hu/
Not only the best media player ever (eat less cpu, tons of keyboard controls, very configurable, and encodes too), but has NO gui. Everything is done with keyboard/mouse shortcuts and OSD display.

I haven't tried it (I don't do Windows), but the guys at http://csant.info/mplayer made a windows version that has skinable gui too.

MPlayer has been out for a while

Here are a couple on a recent Ubuntu installation:

1. To get access to my NTFS partitions, I had to modify FSTAB

2. To get Skype to work, I had to unpack the installation and make an alteration

3. Not so much a text file edit but annoyance, I had to find and redownload a driver to get proper GL acceleration for my ATI card - this whole graphic card driver thing is silly, installation should just work out-of-the-box by now (OpenGL, DRI, etc.) - Richard Stallman be damned.

4. Getting mplayer to work and all codecs installed was pretty straight-forward thanks to the hard work of the guys over at mplayer but hardly passes the "grandma" test. I know a lot of the difficulty is a result of the United State's silly intellectual property laws, but again, "grandma" won't care.

5. Printing is painfully slow on my HP Deskjet (reminiscent of my old Commodore 64 dot matrix printer). Haven't tracked this down yet, but I wouldn't be suprised if there were recompiles/config edits required

I'd put statements about Linux being ready for use by Joe User without recompiles/config file editing in the same bin as statements about prolonged Windows server up-time.

If distributions are breaking your software, you need to find out how and get them to fix it, as it is RUINING your reputation for me and anyone else seeing the same problems.

I recall exactly what the issues were, and other than a few, very early problems that were mostly fixed by 7.1, and all fixed by 7.3,

You keep harping on things like gcc 2.96...

The thing was, everyone else proceded to have the exact same problems a few months later when gcc 3.0 was officially released. There WERE some compiler bugs in 7.0's gcc 2.96, but they were minor and fixed quickly. The REAL PROBLEM was that gcc 2.96 and thus gcc 3.0 enforced standards that gcc 2.x had always been lax about, and thus many programs needed small fixes in order to compile correctly.

So, if you're going to tell a user that their problems aren't problems, but rather stupid platform issues that the player can't possibly do anything but seg fault on,

you might want to talk about the current day and modern compiler releases,

If you go to the main MPlayer site, rather than the MPlayerOSX site, you'll see that they've released a much newer version only a few weeks ago (04/09/2006): http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

why ej: mplayer is a big binary monolith instead of something more modular which can be used by other people.

(and don't even mention the useful but ugly hack that mozplugger is, please).

I'm constantly running into segfaults in mplayer.

Flash itself is bog-slow, indeed. However, if you can rip out the audio/video stream from a Flash video, you can play it with MPlayer. Read the instructions carefully, though! You'll need a CVS snapshot of MPlayer, and also libavcodec, libavformat and libavutil from FFmpeg. Yes it's a lot of work, but well worth the effort, I dare say.

Ah, a direct link to a WMV3 w/ WMA2 audio. Very nice. Anyone want to give me a link that I can actually play?

Last time I checked MPlayer "circumvents" it too. And that's not a Chinese import. It's still illegal, but they will have a lot harder time catching you!

IM: Trillian (needs to be replaced with a Jabber client + aim/yahoo transport)
Been done. gAIM for Windows. Why not clutter up our 100% closed source, proprietary monolythic OS with all sorts of inferrior extensible, modulized open source apps? ;)

IRC: Chatzilla
Well, here's another cross-platform solution: XChat. It has a nifty tabbed based chat management system. Of course, if you want the true Windows/IRC experience, get mIRC, load it up with tons of scripts (both self-activating, and manually activated), and go running through the networks of the world. Just watch out for the UNICODE nasties (mIRC doesn't support UNICODE)

Firewall: Sygate (needs to be replaced)
I can't speak for Sygate, but ZoneAlarm is pretty good, in my opinion. (With exception to games) this is the only closed source recomendation I have here, but what Windows experience is complete without some closed-source freeware/shareware?

This fun game: Typing of the Dead
This one is definately worth a try. Quite fun! It's a little old, but worth it. Speaking of old and worth it, see if you can locate a copy of Commander Keen. It's not really Windows (DOS, actually), but I doubt you'd see it on a Mac.

If you're planning to watch any sort of movies on Windows, there are a few useful programs (some of which are cross-platform):

• VLC media player - a nice all-purpose media player that works with DVDs in addition to many other formats.
• QuickTime Alternative and Real Alternative - free versions of the QT & Real codecs that allow you to play those formats without the need for a separate movie player for each. Also includes browser plugins and Media Player Classic, another free media player similar in appearance to old versions of Windows Media Player.
• ffdshow - a codec that allows Windows Media Player to play videos encoded with divx, xvid, and a bunch of other stuff.
• MPlayer, of course, also exists; I haven't tried it on Windows myself, though, so I can't say how well it works compared to its incarnations on other OSes.